And so it all comes back to the Jackson Five. You knew I’d get there eventually. Please just substitute “writing” for “dancing,” and for the pronoun “she,” please substitute “they”–meaning, of course, us. (There will be some trouble when we get to “sexy lady,” but I’m sure we’ll figure it out.)
And you knew I’d eventually get back to boy bands: MJ and NSync. Not sure pop gets better than this.
My favorite might be the “Soul Train“* performance, but if you watch enough of the videos of “Dancing Machine” on Youtube, you could join in with the dancing, er, uh, I mean, writing, or do I mean singing?
*I watched a retrospective on “Soul Train” recently; if you are unfamiliar with this phenomenal show, you should change that. (I think it was on VH1.) So much I learned about dancing came from watching this show and its dancers when I was very very very young. I never went to a party in high school that didn’t have a line dance, not the Country/Western kind of line dance, though (not that there’s anything wrong with that–did a few in my day)–and by the by, all this line dancing is very Victorian and pre-Victorian–it probably comes from the ancient Egyptians or the Xia Dynasty. I had a mad crush on Don Cornelius (it was a lot like my crush on Frank Sinatra–I really needed to forget his personal life to keep loving what he did for a living). And, since I’m in the confession mode, I always thought Al Green was singing just to me. Still do (just look at him–he’s singing to you, too–he’s a master).
Is dancing text? Maybe. It’s meant to convey meaning and can often do that–emotion, argument, desire, worry, hope, sheer abandon.
Singing is certainly text because, well, it’s writing, but dancing? I think it could be, if we say communication is text or text is communication… if one is illiterate, do the cave paintings become text? Do cathedral windows become text? Do coins become text? If you can’t read words, and pictures are how you learn, maybe text is visual, maybe text is musical, maybe text is about how we connect, not what we use to connect. Hmmm.
Posts by a few of our bloggers have connected dancing to WAC and fascinated me, of course, because I’m a huge fan of dance and WAC and open and learning… and making connections. This one on moving across the curriculum, and this one referencing being wrong and dancing, and this one on connections and SYTYCD, and any one you choose about Sir Ken Robinson and Gillian Lynne.
Many of you have linked science and WAC, learning and WAC, and the connections are stunning. Wordsometimescapeme has mentioned in comments about how reading each blog and our postings on Bb is an incredible way to connect to each other and to learn. We’ve been making connections between blogs like crazy–and making intellectual connections like there’s no tomorrow (loved the one on cliches.)
We are part of a movement of people exploring WAC–and that makes us part of that movement altogether. It does. You might not have thought of it that way before, but we’re in it now.
Movement, of course, is a relevant word for us: we are studying a movement–more than one actually, and we are part of more than one movement. We are WAC. We are OER. We’re moving forward.
Move on, move over, move out, move up. And perhaps, mash up.
As writing machines, we do all those things.
write across this_________ 