Twerking?

[Jane]

Twerking And Race: What The Dance Craze Says About Racial Perceptions Of Dance (VIDEO)

Any hip movement dance is automatically perceived as sexy, and lots of other hot topics presented here that have commonalities with belly dance issues.

 

[AndreaSTL]

I'm copying a comment from the thread:
Rotating, gyrating, moving the hips, pelvis and buttocks around is indeed part of the African culture and Indian culture or ANY culture where the drum and percussion occupy a primary role in music and dance is something akin to worship, you do it from your own spirit, letting the music take control.

I have seen it done well, with beauty and delight with musicality and focus and it can be a beautiful thing. Sensuous or erotic does not always mean nasty and distasteful. However there continues to be a culture clash between the cultures. The puritannical attitudes that led to Elvis getting censored on Ed Sullivan for those illicit, decidedly "negro" hip motions still exist.

That said, as a Caribbean person, these teens are just plain distasteful and inappropriate and this is coming from a seasoned Carnival player, whose instinctive response to music is to move my waistline just as I would expect a Hawaiian native to naturally want to move her waistline.

But the context of school, age, and the motivation behind what these kids are doing just makes it wrong. And worse still, I see NOTHING of art, beauty or anything meritous in what they are doing. It is just purely for shock value.

I agree with this poster. For me it doesn't have anything to do with race or the movement itself. Any girl squatting and bopping her crotch around like that is only trying to be shocking and vulgar. It doesn't help when it's being done just inches from a guy's face, either. Context and stance are everything. Take the omi, for example. Done with the feet together it's a cool swivelly hip move. Do it with the feet wider than the hips and it has a whole new connotation.

I'm a pretty liberal individual, but when I see things like this I just want to tell those girls to respect themselves.

 

[Mosaic]

I had never heard of "twerking" it's just weird, hardly dancing, with only 1 to 2 movements that I can see. I saw a video on youtube ( don't want to insert - it is somewhat off) - it is very & obviously suggestive the way these teens are twerking - Kstylis - Booty me Down - YouTube not one is embarrassed by their fully clothed what I call public masturbation. None of them think about future possible consequences college, jobs) that is for sure. I like Andrea, am no prude & love to see folk having a fun time & dance is fun, but twerking dancing. It doesn't look nice at all. I think I recall Beyonce? or Shakira? & performers like them doing similar moves but in the context of stage performance, not rubbing up against someone or something. I sure hope this doesn't become a world wide phenomena. Quick someone introduce something else.

When I first saw the title I thought Oh no something that is replacing twitter - so "twits" will be replaced by "twerks". I think now after seeing the videos I wish it had been that:lol:
~Mosaic

 

[Safran]

There was planking, then owling, then whatever other fad as well... I guess twerking is another thing in the line of fads that people come up with to entertain yourselves. Some of those things have been very "safe", so probably someone just wanted to do something more "shocking" and "outrageous"... and putting your behind up to the sky and shaking it is pretty outrageous in most of the settings. Even if it initially it had any cultural connections to Africa, it has distanced it so much... For me it is more part of the whole social-media-generation-culture (now that was a perfectly sensible term there :lol

I just realised that in the days of Youtube, Facebook and other similar channels, all those crazes have much shorter life cycles. So, we will probably see many many more of such things arising, but they will also disappear really fast...

 

[Sophia Maria]

I had never heard of "twerking" it's just weird, hardly dancing, with only 1 to 2 movements that I can see.

...I wouldn't be too too harsh on it. The problem with the video on the Huffington Post is that it shows only one clip of several high school girls standing upside down with their legs spread. They are twerking while they are doing it (well, kind of), it doesn't mean that twerking means being upside down with your legs spread. The video (you can find the original on youtube) is in really poor taste as well, but that is a reflection of the taste of the people doing it, not the inherent quality of the dance movement itself.

Twerk is, most of the time--unless you're in a strip club--not a "dance" per se, like hip hop or bellydance. It's just a move. You do it to a certain part of the music within a dance. It's like the shimmy--it's fun to do and layer other things over, certain parts of the music call for it, it can be a showy crowd pleaser, and watching a video of a woman's butt doing that for 4 minutes would bore me as well.

I would agree that the twerking "phenomenon" on youtube is mostly in poor taste, with a lot of videos of nothing but the behinds of women bouncing up and down for an entire song straight. Or worse, in mens' faces. But it doesn't mean that that twerking is automatically bad or sexual--context, context, context.

 

[Mosaic]

...I wouldn't be too too harsh on it. The problem with the video on the Huffington Post is that it shows only one clip of several high school girls standing upside down with their legs spread. They are twerking while they are doing it (well, kind of), it doesn't mean that twerking means being upside down with your legs spread. The video (you can find the original on youtube) is in really poor taste as well, but that is a reflection of the taste of the people doing it, not the inherent quality of the dance movement itself.

Twerk is, most of the time--unless you're in a strip club--not a "dance" per se, like hip hop or bellydance. It's just a move. You do it to a certain part of the music within a dance. It's like the shimmy--it's fun to do and layer other things over, certain parts of the music call for it, it can be a showy crowd pleaser, and watching a video of a woman's butt doing that for 4 minutes would bore me as well.

I would agree that the twerking "phenomenon" on youtube is mostly in poor taste, with a lot of videos of nothing but the behinds of women bouncing up and down for an entire song straight. Or worse, in mens' faces. But it doesn't mean that that twerking is automatically bad or sexual--context, context, context.

I see where you're coming from, but for someone who has never heard of twerking ( silly name) then when you see videos ( several not just Huff Post one) & they all are the same thing, just different people, then you come away with the idea that this thing is a 1 or 2 movement based thing, not a single movement that should be included in a full dance routine. The twerkers (jerkers) all seem to have one aim to do this one twerk movement for an entire song, so one's thoughts can only be ... are you kidding! what is this ridiculous rubbish. The twerky-jerky folk have taken that dance movement IMO & turned it into a so called "dance".

Having said that I can see where one or 2 twerks in a routine can fit in nicely, it is the one-movement wonders who have taken it out of context, here's hoping than a nicer phenomena will make its appearance soon, because in the context we are now seeing it, it is just plain gross & I'm embarrassed for them, hopefully for some of them at least the day will come when they see how embarrassing & inappropriate their twerking in that context is.
~Mosaic

 

[Sophia Maria]

The twerky-jerky folk have taken that dance movement IMO & turned it into a so called "dance".

This is very true. I do think that because the ability to twerk is so played up and become a pop-culture phenomenon, that girls fall over themselves trying to prove that they can do it...and that they can do it for longer and more shockingly than anybody else. And then a video of someone's butt doing that for 4 minutes is just boring to me, because it does not make a dance, and because as a straight woman it does nothing for me to watch that...

But I still wish people (the authors of the endless booty popping videos on youtube, as well as observers) would resist hyper-sexualizing it. But that's my complaint with any dance movement like that for me. Of course that move is showy, of course it is impressive, of course it would be very sexy to the right audience. But that doesn't mean one has to reduce it to that and then go nuts about it. *resists rant*

 

[Farasha Hanem]

When I first bought Ra.One and saw this part, it embarrassed me half to death >.> :



This movie was supposed to be geared towards kids, but I found much of the overall content too adult and would not have allowed my kids to see it had they been younger. Be that as it may, at least the twearking/twerping/twipping/whatever was part of an overall dance routine.

And Shahrukh Khan just looks so darned cute in black... >.>;;;