"Homemade Dancing"
Written by Jose Diaz
September 4, 2001 

Have you ever been really excited about something and so you dance around and celebrate? Do you ever have such an experience and then stop for a minute and realize the patterns and sequences in which you have just moved in are so ridiculous that nobody would call them dancing? My question to you is, would you consider that homemade dancing or an act of atrocity? In this column I would like to compare some of my life situations with those you have seen in the world and then you decide.

On TV, whenever a football player scores a touchdown you see them spike the ball and wiggle their legs frantically. The Smurfs used to do this weird skip and sing at the same time. Someone cleaning their living room while the radio is on will do all these weird movements with their rump. Or perhaps someone watching a music video will lock their door and started dancing to the beat. We call it dancing, but is it really?

I recall many times in my youth I used to spin around and flail my arms to the beat of a song only to find myself getting dizzy. Sometimes I'd snap my singers all over the place while moving with my arms. Even recently I've seen myself watching MTV and making up my own dance steps to a video. However as embarassed as I am of everything listed above, nothing tops the happy dance. Yes, we all have one. We get happy and then start doing some kind of dance that makes others believe our bodies are horribly discontourted. The ultimate in embarassment, if anyone saw me in mid dance the same would last for years. But yet I ask myself why am I ashamed? Is it because I don't consider it a real dance?

That's basically the bottom line. If someone is embarassed by the way they move it is because they either don't consider themselves good dancers or the dance in particular isn't quite a dance. Yet, what is the true definition of a dance? Who gets to decide what is a dance and what isn't? Is it decided by mass popularity? Is it a famous person who does it first thats gets to officially declare it a dance? ? I myself won't call call the movements I do dancing by any means purely out of shame but many others disagree with me. It's food for thought.

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