FYI. About dancing and antiquated cabaret laws. We should all be dancing tango in the streets! :)
THE NEW YORK TIMES June 3, 2007 Op-Ed Contributor Dance, Dance, Revolution By BARBARA EHRENREICH COMPARED with most of the issues that the venerable civil liberties lawyer Norman Siegel takes up, this one may seem like the ultimate in urban frivolity: Late last month, he joined hundreds of hip-hoppers, salsa dancers, Lindy Hoppers and techno-heads boogying along Fifth Avenue to protest New York Citys 80-year-old restrictions on dancing in bars. But disputes over who can dance, how and where, are at least as old as civilization, and arise from the longstanding conflict between the forces of order and hierarchy on the one hand, and the deep human craving for free-spirited joy on the other. New Yorks cabaret laws limit dancing to licensed venues. They date back to the Harlem Renaissance, which had created the unsettling prospect of interracial dancing. For decades, no one paid much attention to the laws until Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, bent on turning Manhattan into a giant mall/food court, decided to get tough. Today, the city far more famous for its night life than its Sunday services has only about 170 venues where it is legal to get up and dance hence last months danced protest, as well as an earlier one in February. Dust-ups over dancing have become a regular feature of urban life. Dance clubs all over the country have faced the threat of shutdowns because the dancing sometimes spills over into the streets. While neighbors annoyed by sleepless nights or the suspicion of illegal drug use may be justified in their concerns, conflict over public dancing has a long history one that goes all the way back to the ancient Mediterranean world. The Greeks danced to worship their gods especially Dionysus, the god of ecstasy. But then the far more strait-laced Romans cracked down viciously on Dionysian worship in 186 B.C., even going on to ban dancing schools for Roman children a few decades later. The early Christians incorporated dance into their liturgy, despite church leaders worries about immodesty. But at the end of the fourth century, the archbishop of Constantinople issued the stern pronouncement: For where there is a dance, there is also the Devil. The Catholic Church did not succeed in prohibiting dancing within churches until the late Middle Ages, and in doing so perhaps inadvertently set off the dance manias that swept Belgium, Germany and Italy starting in the 14th century. Long attributed to some form of toxin ergot or spider venom the manias drove thousands of people to the streets day and night, mocking and menacing the priests who tried to stop them. In northern Europe, Calvinism brought a hasty death to the old public forms of dancing, along with the costuming, masking and feasting that had usually accompanied them. All that survived, outside of vestiges of folk dancing, were the elites tame, indoor ballroom dances, fraught, as in todays Dancing With the Stars, with anxiety over a possible misstep. When Europeans fanned out across the globe in the 18th and 19th centuries, the colonizers made it a priority to crush the danced rituals of indigenous people, which were seen as savagery, devil worship and prelude to rebellion. ... -- Carol Ruth Shepherd Arborlaw PLC Ann Arbor MI USA 734 668 4646 v 734 786 1241 f http://arborlaw.com intellectual assets • internet • infringement • incorporation _______________________________________________ Tango-L mailing list [email protected] http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/tango-l
