This is the Bop. The Bop is a type of social dance. Dance is a language, and social dance is an expression that emerges from a community. Below, Camille A. Brown offers a brief history of African-American social dance.

A social dance isn’t choreographed by any one person. It can’t be traced to any one moment. Each dance has steps that everyone can agree on, but it’s about the individual and their creative identity. Because of that, social dances bubble up, they change, and they spread like wildfire. They are as old as our remembered history. In African-American social dances, we see over 200 years of how African and African-American traditions influenced history. The present always contains the past. And the past shapes who we are and who we will be.

Now, social dance is about community and connection; if you knew the steps, it meant you belonged to a group. But what if it becomes a worldwide craze? Enter the Twist.

It’s no surprise that the Twist can be traced back to the 19th century, brought to America from the Congo during slavery. But in the late ‘50s, right before the Civil Rights Movement, the Twist is popularized by Chubby Checker and Dick Clark. Suddenly, everybody’s doing the Twist: white teenagers, kids in Latin America. It makes its way into songs and movies. Through social dance, the boundaries between groups become blurred.

The story continues in the 1980s and ’90s. Along with the emergence of hip-hop, African-American social dance took on even more visibility, borrowing from its long past, shaping culture and being shaped by it. Today, these dances continue to evolve, grow and spread.

Why do we dance? To move, to let loose, to express.

Why do we dance together? To heal, to remember, to say: “We speak a common language. We exist and we are free.”

Camille A. Brown is a choreographer fusing dance and social commentary to explore race, sexuality and femininity.

Title Design by Kozmonot Animation Studio

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In the third act of “Swan Lake”, the Black Swan pulls off a seemingly endless series of turns, bobbing up and down on one pointed foot and spinning around and around and around … thirty-two times. It’s one of the toughest sequences in ballet, and for those thirty seconds or so, she’s like a human top in perpetual motion. Those spectacular turns are called fouettés, which means “whipped” in French, describing the dancer’s incredible ability to whip around without stopping. Below, Arleen Sugano explains the physics of this famous ballet move.

The dancer starts the fouetté by pushing off with her foot to generate torque. But the hard part is maintaining the rotation. As she turns, friction between her pointe shoe and the floor, and somewhat between her body and the air, reduces her momentum. So how does she keep turning? Between each turn, the dancer pauses for a split second and faces the audience. Her supporting foot flattens, and then twists as it rises back onto pointe, pushing against the floor to generate a tiny amount of new torque.

At the same time, her arms sweep open to help her keep her balance. The turns are most effective if her center of gravity stays constant, and a skilled dancer will be able to keep her turning axis vertical.

The extended arms and torque-generating foot both help drive the fouetté. But the real secret and the reason you hardly notice the pause is that her other leg never stops moving. During her momentary pause, the dancer’s elevated leg straightens and moves from the front to the side, before it folds back into her knee.

By staying in motion, that leg is storing some of the momentum of the turn. When the leg comes back in towards the body, that stored momentum gets transferred back to the dancer’s body, propelling her around as she rises back onto pointe.

As the ballerina extends and retracts her leg with each turn, momentum travels back and forth between leg and body, keeping her in motion.

In Tchaikovsky’s ballet, the Black Swan is a sorceress, and her 32 captivating fouettés do seem almost supernatural. But it’s not magic that makes them possible. It’s physics.

Animation by Dancing Line Productions/TED-Ed

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