Forget Beyoncé’s new dance – I’m crazy in love with these routines

Posted by admin in All Clips, Music Albums on 01 15th, 2009 | one response

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The star’s bootylicious moves in her latest video have inspired plenty of YouTube tributes, but you’re better off sticking to a simple Macarena

Belonging, as she does, to a gilded sphere far above, it is no surprise that many seek to bask in the rays reflected by Beyoncé Knowles – singer, dancer, actor, perfume promoter, drinker of water and maple syrup, and all-round source of bootylicious fabulousness. Many want to look like her, sound like her, even smell like her. But until now I had little idea quite how many people want to dance like her.

The video for Beyoncé’s Single Ladies (Put a Ring On It) – in which Beyoncé and two backing dancers in unforgiving leotards perform an energetic routine mixing jazzy, Bob Fosse-influenced moves with club-style body shakes and rolls – has spawned a legion of YouTube imitations. The ones that leave the most lasting impression, at least for me, are Cubby Dances to Beyonce Single Ladies, in which the portly Cubby shimmies and pouts almost as convincingly as Ms Knowles herself, and Single Ladies (Big Girl Remix), which features the eponymous “big girls” wearing devil horns and shaking their stuff in a basement room.

Tongue-in-cheek their renditions may be, but Cubby and the Big Girls – and the many other home-video dancers – have managed to replicate at least part of a seriously difficult routine, masterminded by Beyoncé’s 19-year-old choreographer JaQuel Knight. It recalls the recent vogue for wedding couples learning the Time of Your Life sequence from Dirty Dancing for their first dance: intricate steps, a sense of musicality, that lift. It’s a long way from the mashed potato.

All of which makes me somewhat exhausted. I long for the days when mastering the latest dance craze involved nothing more than taking a step to the right, placing a hand on the hips and pretending to drive a car. In celebration of that bygone era, here’s my personal selection of the five best – and blessedly simple – dance crazes of recent decades.

By Guardian.co.uk