How to Dance like Sha Na Na
by George J. Leonard, 67C, Conception and Choreography Sha Na Na.
(COLUMBIA COLLEGE TODAY, Spring/Summer 1989, p. 30)
The next time you see Woodstock or Grease, or PBS's Welcome to the Fillmore
East, here's how to dance along. Pick up a dummy mike, turn up your collar,
take the shade off the lamp and look at your shadow on the wall. Don't practice
before a mirror-- you'll start acting with your face, and past the tenth row
it's just a blur. Remember, 300,000 stoned freaks are waiting to see you.
Let's learn a gold-lame lead-singer move, "The Spanish Turn." I saw
Chuck Jackson do it at the Apollo, then worked it out with my dance teacher,
Boris Butleroff. Hold your mike and stand at ease. Keeping all your weight on
your left leg, lift your weightless right foot and, using only your toe-- keeping
your right heel daintily high-- elegantly draw a line in the dust starting at
two o'clock and ending at ten o'clock, as far in front of your left foot as
you can-- now freeze! Your right toe rests on ten o'clock, your right leg is
crossed in front of you almost as if you sat in a chair. You're coiled.
Shift all your weight to the ball of your right foot and spin on it counterclockwise,
one full turn, so that you end facing the 300,000 freaks. The full spin will
throw you left: don't fight it, you'll find you naturally fall to your right
knee, just as you should. Throw your left arm up at a 45-degree angle, fingers
together and straight, thumb tucked inside palm for a clean line, head wrenched
left parallel to the arm. If perfect, you're a silhouette on the shade: knees,
toes, head, arm, all point exactly at what was nine o'clock. Tip your mike toward
the audience so you send their roars out at them over the amps.
To do real Sha Na Na, you need a friend to simultaneously Spanish Turn right
while you S.T. left (he ends up pointing at three o'clock, you're pointing at
nine) and another friend to stand between you two, S.T. in place (hard!) and
sink slowly to both knees. (Watch Rob do it in PBS's "Welcome to the Fillmore
East" during Teen Angel.) Finally, add music. You sing: "TEEN an-gel
. . ." and Spanish turn to the left. Then your friend on the far end sings
"TEEN an-gel..." and Spanish turns right. Then the Center man sings,
"TEEN An-gel . . " and does his Spanish turn, slowly to both knees.
Now,tutti:: "OOO--oooooo . . .!"
The last part--- the difference between soul dance and what's now called Fifties
dance--- I got by taking graduate aesthetics with Richard Kuhns, who still teaches
philosophy at Columbia. Through Professor Kuhns, I came to read Susan Sontag's
Against Interpretation and acquired her taste for High Camp and Busby Berkeley's
30's dance films, like Forty-Second Street. - The choreography America now instantly
thinks of as Fifties is really a uniquely Columbia synthesis: a 22-year-old
Susan Sontag buff applying Busby Berkeley mass symmetries to the soul moves
he saw down the hill at the Apollo. And my novels later were the same Pop Art
mix, equal parts Dostoevski and Death Wish 6. Pure Columbia style!