Do You Wanna Dance?

Still from a video of two men dancing in a room with bookshelves and the caption over the top of the image reads, "POV: It's the 90's. You and your cousins have spent all day choreographing a dance that nobody in the family asked for . . ."

Over the weekend my sister texted me a link to this Facebook video, which our cousin had sent to her. In case you don’t feel like watching a video, there’s a screenshot above, which gives you a pretty good idea of what the video is all about. What made this video particularly relevant to us is that we lived through the 1990s, and we did on more than one occasion spend all day with our cousins choreographing our own dance routines that no one on earth had asked for.

To this day I can’t hear the song “Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)” by the Eurythmics without thinking of the hours we spent putting together our synchronized dance routine. There was a part where we would lift our heads up in unison as the line “hold your head up” was uttered so obviously this was some next level choreography.

Does video or photographic evidence exist of any of these endeavors? Not that I’m aware of. This was the 1990s after all. We did have camcorders, but didn’t have access to them all the time. In fact, if we had access to a camcorder we were probably using it to film our own movie. Dance routines were how we entertained ourselves when we didn’t have ready access to a camcorder.

There is some video evidence of my sister and I doing our own dance routines. That’s where the grainy image below was taken from. I’m the one in the white t-shirt:

Blurry, grainy photo of two girls dancing in a very cluttered finished basement.

Do kids still make up dance routines for no good reason at all? I hope so. It was fun, and a pretty good workout, too. It definitely kept us entertained for hours, and all we needed was access to a tape deck or a CD player and our own imagination. So, if you happen to have some kids of your own, I encourage you to do your part in raising a new generation of dance routine makers.

As for me and my cousins, none of us grew up to do anything in the field of dance or choreography, but one time my sister ended up having to be a last minute backup dancer at a Weird Al concert at the concert venue where we worked and put her hours of experience to work to create a dance routine for the show. So, really you never know where making up dances will lead. Even if it’s just the fact that hearing a certain song will instantly transport you back to a basement and the steps to particular dance routine dreamed up all those years ago.

— Alissa