Dance and sound performance based on a disco hit
You Should Be Dancing is a sound and dance performance that investigates the limits of time in music, dance and human movement, in collaboration with spanish dancer Javier Vaquero Ollero. What happens when a disco hit and its choreography are slowed down to a point in which the sound is barely recognizable and there’s virtually no movement? The performance consists of a careful re-enactment, in dance and sound, of a 3-second section of a disco hit by the Bee Gees and its accompanying dance scene in the movie Saturday Night Fever – both are performed 240 times slower than the original. In this new rendering, John Travolta’s gestures, maybe the most iconic dance moves in pop culture, are closer to a butoh dance: they’re nearly frozen instead of flowing freely, whilst the music morphs into a rich compound of layered, haunting sound textures, bringing up a discomfortable relation between the original and this version that is amplified by the sheer physical strain on the dancer.
Listen to the full soundtrack below: