Tuesday Tune Two-Fer: Sympathy for the Dancers

If you were to see me in person, no doubt the first thing that would come to mind would be “now that guy is a dancer!”

Sadly, you’d be mistaken. But I sure do like looking at dancers, especially in movies. My intense love of movie musicals like The Band Wagon, Singin’ in the Rain, and An American In Paris was yet another one of those things that went blissfully unquestioned in all the years before I came out. But the big movie musicals have mostly gone out of favor, despite the efforts of Steven Spielberg, and when they do pop up, they’re usually emphasizing the animation or the CGI or Lin-Manuel Miranda’s wordplay, instead of live humans dancing.

So even though I’m not a huge fan of Jungle as musicians, I do appreciate when their videos pop up in my YouTube recommendations, because they’re all showcases for a recurring troupe of contemporary dancers. I think my favorite is “Keep Me Satisfied,” because the choreography feels to me like a combination of Michael Jackson’s and Gene Kelly’s. The guys at the beginning are doing poses right out of Kelly’s “gotta dance” ballet.

At least, that’s how I see it. I’m pretty much completely ignorant of contemporary dance. Which is probably a huge part of why I like watching it. Because it’s inherently expressive, and because I don’t even have the language to describe it, I can’t overthink it or over-analyze it. It either fails to connect with me at all, or it knocks me flat on my ass.

Which is precisely what happened with “It’s Not That Serious,” directed and choreographed by Ricky Ubeda and set to the song “Sympathy” by Vampire Weekend.

I saw a clip of it on Instagram, starting at the bit where the man and the woman are looking into each other’s eyes, and all of a sudden, a woman in a sweater vest and neckerchief pops up in the foreground and appears to be doing choreography from an entirely different type of video. Is this some kind of Tik Tok1 thing where people are dancing in front of music videos or something?

Anyway, I was immediately captivated by that short clip, and I had to find the rest of it. What is this for? Is it from a movie? Apparently not; as far as I can tell, it exists only to be awesome. At the time I’m writing this, I first saw it about 3 hours ago, and I’ve already watched it around 6,000 times. My husband — who had to suffer through my obsession with the Kenzo World video starring Margaret Qualley — came upstairs and asked, “uh oh, is there a new earworm?”

I don’t even pay much attention to clothes in videos, but I’m obsessed with what everybody’s wearing in this one, like they’re all from some international prep school for only the hottest children of diplomats. I love every single thing about it, is what I’m saying.

And from what little I know about dance, this video seems to have all of it. Modern dance to hip hop to boxing to Bollywood and probably a dozen styles I could never hope to recognize. The only frame of reference I have is the one time I saw Punchdrunk perform “The Drowned Man” in London, and while it was mostly lost on me as immersive theater, seeing the dancers right there in front of me performing with such precision and energy after 2+ hours took my breath away.

I’m glad I don’t know enough about it to understand it, because every once in a while I just get to see people pouring themselves into the creation of something like this, and it makes me think, “No, this world is a good place, actually.”

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