New York Times: We Were Born to Be Kissed in the Dark. “Let us recite an irreverent prayer for the club, the disco, the spot. For the battleground of our unleashing, the church of our weekly baptisms of the bitter week, the tent show revival of our rapture. Let us bow our heads and say “Remember when …” as if we are as old as Methuselah, as if we’ve seen all the world wars and we know the taste of tombstones. Remember when we danced?”
New York Times: Hire a D.J. and Turn the Music Up. “In real life, the people who have the most fun are the people who just let themselves go. So, in your apartment, do the same thing. Set up a private event on Zoom or another platform with your friends, and then livestream a D.J.’s set, so you’re all sharing the same music. Then, just groove. Here are some tips to find the vibe, no matter what age you are.”
CBC: Métis dancers keep connected by putting a spin on a social media trend. “A group of Métis jiggers from Manitoba are keeping connected by putting their own spin on a new social media trend. The trend, which is often found in videos on the app TikTok, involves users covering their phone camera with a makeup brush and then pulling it away, revealing their new outfit, makeup styles or in some cases traditional regalia and dance styles.”
The Next Web: Sorry, but you can’t copyright a meme. “Epic Games, creator of the smash hit Fortnite, currently faces a tornado of lawsuits over its use and sale of in-game animations based on dance moves popularized by celebrities. The Supreme Court is involved, the public is divided, and entertainers are seemingly getting screwed. But who really owns a meme? For the answer to that question we turned to legal experts and the ghost of a dancing celebrity from the 1930s.”
The Verge: Deepfakes for dancing: you can now use AI to fake those dance moves you always wanted. “Artificial intelligence is proving to be a very capable tool when it comes to manipulating videos of people. Face-swapping deepfakes have been the most visible example, but new applications are being found every day. The latest? Call it deepfakes for dancing — it uses AI to read someone’s dance moves and copy them on to a target body.”
BusinessWire: Mellon Foundation Grant to USC Libraries and USC Glorya Kaufman School of Dance to Support Digital Collection for Dance Heritage (PRESS RELEASE). “Thanks to a $560,000 grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation under its Arts and Cultural Heritage program area, the USC Libraries and the USC Glorya Kaufman School of Dance will create a new home for a rich collection of recordings of more than 1,200 culturally significant dance performances digitized at hubs in New York, San Francisco, and Washington, D.C., over 15 years by the Dance Heritage Coalition.”
Weekend fun from ABC News Australia: Museum Dance-Off sees curators cut loose with moves unlikely to gain much street cred. “Librarians, archivists, curators and sound technicians are not normally associated with busting a move, but staff from two national institutions in Canberra are in the midst of battling it out in the fifth international Museum Dance-Off. While unlikely to gain any street cred for their dance moves, about 165 staff at the National Film and Sound Archive (NFSA) have embraced the limelight to produce a music video and go toe-to-toe with the National Portrait Gallery.”
New to me, thanks to a tipoff from Reddit: a digital archive dedicated to early 1990s raves in Sydney, Australia. I can’t decide what I like better: the gallery of rave flyers from 1989-1998, the huge collection of rave “mixtapes,” or the surprisingly solid video section (surprising amount of video here, considering that this was pre-ubiquitous-phone-camera.)
Hey! The Library of Congress is getting a tap dance archive! “TAP DANCE IN AMERICA, a free Library of Congress online database, will contain the most comprehensive and detailed collection of tap dance documentation on record. LIVE ON FEBRUARY 12, the interactive encyclopedia will include a 3,000 record database searchable by title, date, venue; dancer, choreographer, director, producer and performance medium (film, television, radio, stage, club) as well as by names of ‘tap numbers’ and tap choreographies.”
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