A Blizzarts Danceoff, or, Freedom and Fear on a Monday in Montreal. by risa
Last night about twenty fine couples shook their stuff with all their hearts at the strange, tiny and fabulous anomaly that is Blizzarts bar on St.Laurent, here in Montreal.
Even when I was about seventeen this spot was tops. Back when it used to be called Flipsides (if I remember right) and my highschool friend Bobby had his first DJ night, we’d go and dance and revel in the fact that we were actually in a bar every Saturday. The layout there is both irritating and ideal. It’s long and slim, just like most of the apartments here, built as a tiny echo of the long, slim land plots laid down across this Indian ground over 150 years ago. There is a spot by the window that is open and the chairs are chill and low; and then the walking narrows between booths and bar as you squeeze your way to the bathroom or the dance floor in the back. This is great for cozy ‘accidental’ conversations, but it must have been terrifying when, one Friday night five-ish years ago, the party was broken up by skinheads with bats and the small crowd for a moment thought they had nowhere to go.
Last night though, beneath the looming Omen mural, dancers lept and twisted and even macarena’d and there was no space, really, for anything like hate. I bring that old scary memory, like the memory of a city built on other people’s land, into this little story about couples dancing off (and a crowd piled on top of booths and bar cheering for their favorites) because these old forgotten things are part of the truth of a place. And I thought briefly about all of that last night as a watched the hot and brave and bendy couples sprawl and slam and laugh around the floor- because for how long in the history of the world has this been possible? That the couples were of all colors and kinds, girls danced with girls, and boys danced with boys, boys danced with girls and kissed their boys during the breaks, girls danced with boys in all kinds of sexed-up and hilarious ways and none of it seemed in the least bit new or strange.
In the end, after about five two-song elimination rounds, there were just two couples standing. One made up of two balletic, leaping lovely girls with matching jazz-hand moves, and the other of a boy and girl with matching headbands who spun and mimed with such mesmerizing focus that they couldn’t help but win our hearts and the fifty dollar prize. This was no “dancing with the stars,” there were no leaps or holds that I could see. These winners shook the beery, clapping crowd and stamping happy judges with their balls-out sense of humour and their sweaty self-less energy. Sometimes dancing is self-conscious and sometimes its a gift, you know?
Charles J. Stivale describes the feeling of accumulating and colliding relations on a dance floor in his essay “Feeling the Event”- a heavy-theory exploration of his own long and loving relationship with Cajun music and dance:
“The particular kind of event that I consider here may be situated sociohistorically:” he says; “the Cajun music “renaissance” that developed slowly in the 1960’s reached a crescendo in the mid-1980s and now has settled into the continual development of Cajun cultural forms. Among the most important of these are the expansion of the repertoire of musical compositions, both old and new, and the maintenance of a limited number of dance steps, notably the Cajun waltz and two-step, to which has been added more recently an adaptation of the jitterbug to Cajun music (see plater, Speyer and Speyer, 1993). On the couple-dominated social dance floor, whatever the cadence- that is, the aural landscape to which one responds, or dance steps chosen- there exists only the “in-between” of this smooth-striated interaction, yet in various degrees of modulation between the smooth-striated poles. For the relation of dance movement to the space of affect is not fully striated- that is, strictly hierarchized by customs and rules set in place, despite the implicit imposition of many of these depending on the particular venue. Nor is the relation entirely smooth, allowing unfettered openness to free flows of movement or total improvisation, yet again depending on the venue. Rather, only passages and combinations of movement and rest between smooth and striated spaces emerge to animate the initially empty dance site.”
When the dance competition was over and all of us non-competitive fan dancer types pushed onto the floor, you could feel the smooth-striated lumpiness rolling into different kinds of affects. We had more moves than we’d had before and we were inspired by the partners’ voguing, swinging creativity. Out on the street hungry people still asked us for change, and as we walked up St. Laurent someone remembered that there had been a shooting the night before outside a club we were close to passing by, and that the girl who had been shot was exactly my same age. These are the facts, the striations, the dark valleys that every kind of joyful interchange exists in the face of. We can dance, or drink, or sing, to build a closed, delighted, forgetful space where we allow ourselves to feel above the city’s dark sides and dangers. Or we can dance to build up our courage a bit, and to reach out a little further beyond our circles to the people left waiting in the wings.
Nights like last night’s danceoff that echo with old wartime history, and with new kinds of inclusions, (and homemade cupcakes,) have a quiet politics at their core. And maybe this is a product of this strange bubble, bi-lingual, splotchy thing that is Montreal (the same kind of between-binaries Franglais hybridity that sprouted Cajun culture too). And maybe also it’s the product of hours of creative work of the part of promoters like Murad- who has been handmaking little matchbook fliers and inspired evenings for us for years. But mostly, as we all knew and said to each other yesterday, those kinds of nights are the product of many strange magnetic coincidences, drawing us out on a Monday when we had no real plans towards the brilliant ridiculousness of a danceoff that suddenly, for a moment, gave the sticky fest-filled summer a new shape.
by Risa Dickens
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