Dance Remix

I was recently going through some old e-mails and I found a couple neat youtube videos from years ago. Both consist of remixes and both have the common theme of dance.

I'm sure many of you have experienced the first video, "The Evolution of Dance", which you can watch here. The video consists of a mashup of 20+ songs, starting with Elvis and in consecutive order, ends with Jay-Z. The dancer on stage, Judson Laipply, demonstrates the most relevant and recognizable dance that can be associated with the song and the era communicated through each song. Because this one mashup samples songs in a timely fashion, it tells a sort of story of not only the music that was popular throughout the years, but also of the way popular dance has evolved over time. Laipply does a fantastic job of demonstrating these dances, and what makes it so entertaining for us to watch (even though we did not live through the years in which most of the dances were popular), is that through repetition, we are able to recognize and identify with most of the dances. This particular mashup of song and dance acts as a quick look-back and we can gather a general idea of the musical changes that have happened over time.

The other remix I discovered is one with a similar theme. It it is a series of dance scenes from movies, complied together to one single song, 'Footloose'. You can watch the video here. This video is a compilation of scenes from films from the 1940's with Fred Astaire tapping, to Mary Poppins, to Sandy and Danny dancing in Grease, to Jessica Alba hip-hoppin' in the 2003 movie Honey. What is so interesting about it is that even though all of these scenes are from such different eras and are in such different styles of dance, they all work together to go with the very catchy song. The overall social commentary of this video is more about the last 80 years of dance coming together and successfully working together to create something very entertaining.

I thought that you would all enjoy these videos and that they could be a good basis for topic of discussion regarding remix and dance.