Remember Snowball, the sulphur-crested cockatoo whose fancy footwork to the Backstreet Boys’ “Everybody (Backstreet’s Back)” brought him viral fame in 2007? I recently rewatched the video, and it holds up. Here is this bird, perched on the back of a chair. As the song opens, he appears to be sketching out his moves, getting a feel for the song. When the chorus arrives, he shrieks and grooves, he high-kicks and head-bangs, settling into his rhythm, possessed by the beat.
The video of Snowball is astonishing because of how humanlike he is. Look, an animal moving spontaneously to the music, just like we do! Or, rather, just like we can. We can dance, but how often do we, really? Aside from weddings or other milestone occasions, when was the last time you really cut a rug?
We don’t dance as much as we could, or as much as we want to, because we’re afraid to look foolish. That greeting card exhortation to “dance like no one’s watching” caught on for a reason.
When I was in high school, a group of friends and I would regularly park a car in our town’s commuter train station parking lot, blast some music from the stereo and dance. There, in one of the weird open spaces suburban teenagers can own after dark, we’d move just to move, trying out our bodies in space, together, before hitting the local diner for grilled cheese.
Those nights were exhilarating, opportunities to turn off our brains and let loose, to express ourselves physically, outside of the limited vernacular we normally afforded ourselves as self-conscious teenagers.
When you ask people why they don’t dance more, they get pensive, maybe a little defensive. They don’t have time, they don’t have the opportunity, what are they going to do, go to a club? These are people with responsibilities, with jobs and children! Dancing, one person suggested to me sadly, is something you do when you’re young and then you stop.
This perception of dancing as unserious, as something frivolous people…
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