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Monday, February 11, 2019

Dance on Oahu

By Frances Ching, Manoa

It should be an integrated pattern of human knowledge, belief, and behavior in dancing that depends upon the capacity for learning and transmitting knowledge to succeeding generations. It has been occurring for almost two centuries on these islands and the changes are happening and continuing now. It is the customary beliefs, social forms, and material traits of a social dance group; also the characteristic features of everyday existence (as diversions or a way of life} shared by people in a place or time such as on the Island of Oahu.

“Social dancers know that nothing is more revealing than movement to music.
The body can say what words cannot.”


Our dance patterns are changing every day led by our youth. However, 99% of their new stuff is eventually relegated to the past. The 1% has value and will be absorbed. But youth is youth and they will always be that way. 100 years from now most of us will be dancing new styles but all based on the same simple principles that have always been used by humans. It can be a set of shared attitudes, values, goals, and practices of our dancing that characterizes an institution or organization. It is structured as a living organism and grows on its own.

"I'll Be Your Everything" by Tommy Page 1990


It has a set of values, conventions, or social practices associated with partner dancing and changing the culture of materialism will take time. Most of the dancers on this island are in the in-between groups of the strict International or the freedom of young club dancers. They may dable in any of the other peripherals of their choice and for their own reasons. And the clubs are becoming less private and more open to public membership. We have been and continue to be a Work In Progress. There will be more "public" dance clubs forming and a few dance clubs that will be calling it a day. Especially the ones that are tied to International as their theme and are holding on at present. But of course the new clubs forming will have the accepted methods of the developing cultural dance.

“You may say I'm a dreamer, but I'm not the only one. I hope someday you'll join us.
And the world will live as one.” ― John Lennon = Imagine

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