Bump the Bodgie Boogie
By John Davies
Published in Nation Review, 27 October – 2 November 1977
A professional dancer told me recently that he feels dance must be the hardest subject to cover in words. “Nobody really understands what dance is all about,” he said.
Was he right?
I went to a disco that night to watch ordinary folk dancing. They make no connection between what they do and what goes on in professional ballet, but their dancing under the flickering lights and thundering music has some meaning for them.
So what is it that makes their experience meaningful?
Get up and dance
There is no doubt that through the body alone we can achieve a kind of truth. In spite of the fact that in our openly sexual age we admit an enthusiasm for our own and others’ bodies we give little attention to understanding our use of them in dance.
Dance is partly an affirmation that we are alive, a here-we-are gesture, and beyond that a cooperation with our essential life force, a using of our bodies to entertain ourselves and others as naturally as we can use our minds.
There are truths which can only be understood physically, and for those who find little entertainment in the mind dance can be their only way heavenward in this life. So dance has moved through waltz, jitterbug, twist, to the stage now where everyone has their own individual haphazard style. We are all trying to find the way.
My musician friends may kill me for saying this, but disco music has been taking hold of my soul for some time now and when it became a mass audience growth industry penetrating deeply into top 40 lists I knew that humanity’s sacred hour had come.
It was an assertion of dance as a universal human activity. The act of dancing itself had become paramount. Look at the song titles: Dancing queen, You make me feel like dancing, Ain’t gonna bump no more…
Disco is the most pervasive musical form since swing and rock. It is a higher point in our evolution, the perfect music for the way we are living now, the beat we move to.
A grand hotel
For a glimpse at the way we live now I took my shadowy self to the upstairs pool room at the Astra hotel, a marvel of our culture, a landmark overlooking the beach and village that we call Bondi. Anthropologists should go there in busloads, but perhaps it is better that they stay away and leave it to sympathetic white hunters like myself.
There was a time when I could spend ten hours at a stretch here. An afternoon and evening at the Astra was for me what the bullfight was to Hemingway.
The afternoons are quiet with the click-thump of cue sticks and balls rolling into pockets. There are not many women around at first but you can see them coming over the hills with an eager look in their eyes as they arrive in twos and threes in a steady pilgrimage.
The afternoon is mainly for the sharp players to warm up, or for the people who can’t think of anywhere else to go, or for those like myself who cherish the rhythm of an Astra conclave from beginning to end.
By early evening your true aficionado is expectant. Something is going to happen soon. Example. One of the players moves unnoticed to the interior overhead balcony, takes down his trousers and exposes his rear. His friends try to poke him through the railing with the tip of a cue stick.
You know immediately it is going to be a good night.
The bare arse is wonderfully symbolic of modern life and my disco thesis. The Astra was once a grand hotel and where the pool tables are now there were once dining tables. At one end of the enormous room there was once a full orchestra with grand piano and potted palms. No doubt they danced then too, God bless them, and if their elegant ghosts are still present they can watch their grand-children dancing to the ultimate disco beat on a teensy square of wooden floor near the juke box, surrounded by booze and pool.
If the rhythm of an Astra night is right there will be a brawl at ten. There will be confrontations over whose turn it is to play the next game of pool, then suddenly a fist will smash out, chairs and tables will be knocked over.
Others will join in the fight, then more will move in to pull them apart. On a very good night you can see three fights. They have the sleepy slow motion quality of all pub fights, but if the Maoris are there one of them may grab a cue stick and crack it on someone’s head.
The connoisseur is satisfied, almost.
(The full text of this article is now incorporated in the collection Bodgie Boogie: Nation Review Features 1977-78 - available as an eBook in Kindle format from Amazon.com http://amzn.com/B00BARVIOE )