Chris Bickford

Mimi’s, Friday Night

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In 1812, Amos Stoddard wrote that Louisianans “are particularly attached to the exercise of dancing, and they carry it to an incredible excess”.  Reid Mitchell, quoting Stoddard in his book All on a Mardi Gras Day, writes, “According to Stoddard, balls lasted from early evening to early morning, and the irrepressible, apparently inexhaustible Louisianans would attend balls two or three nights in a row.”

Little seems to have changed in New Orleans in that regard.  Though the town is known throughout the world for its music, it often goes un-noted that the musical forms indigenous to New Orleans and greater Louisiana were created for dancing, and that, when anybody in decent health is exposed to the “real thing”, it is almost impossible to refrain from getting down in time to the heavy syncopated beats and heady contrapuntal melodies being generated by the band…and that means dancing, dancing, dancing.  Dancing in the streets, dancing in the bars, dancing in the house to old records…dancing just about anywhere there is space.   New Orleans is a town that is mad for the dance.

I’m not talking about your ordinary night-club shake-your-booty dancing (though there is plenty of that too).   What I’m talking about is something more sophisticated, more spontaneous, more beautiful.   Walk into the tiny Spotted Cat on Frenchmen Street and chances are you’ll catch a pair of twenty-somethings cutting a rug to an unamplified brass band, doing the Lindy Hop like they were born in the ’30’s and dancing at a postwar victory ball.  Wander down the street and you’ll find young Cuban and Puerto Rican expats salsa-dancing with such ease and sensuality you’ll want to hop on a plane for Old San Juan and never leave until you’ve mastered the dance and found yourself a permanent dancing partner.   Around the corner at BMC on a Sunday night, you’ll find couples in jeans and cowboy boots country-dancing to a rockabilly band.   If one of the city’s famous rag-tag hippie jug-bands is playing on a street corner or closed storefront alcove, you can bet there will be a few swing dancers stepping out on to the street.   Out towards the Bywater, upstairs at Mimi’s, a DJ is playing an inspired mix of Clifton Chenier, Hank Williams, Elvis Presley, and Carl Perkins, and folks are jitterbugging like no tomorrow.

And then of course, there are the Second-Lines, part parade and part street dance, which roll through the back neighborhoods on Sunday afternoons, put on by various social clubs; or which erupt spontaneously just about anywhere if there is cause for celebration.   Everyone is welcome to join in, and everything in the dancers’ path–mailboxes, street lamps, cars, garbage cans–become stages and props for the endless improvisatory steps of the avid second-liner.

There is no end to the dance in New Orleans.   It is, I suppose, what keeps the place going in spite of all the tragedy, injustice, corruption, violence, and decay that keep threatening to destroy the city.   Somehow, after three regime changes and countless waves of immigration; after malaria and spotted fever and fires that burned half the city to the ground; after Reconstruction, the decline of the Gens de Couleur Libres, and the insidious enactment of the Jim Crow laws; after de-segregation, white flight, and urban decay; and after Betsy and Katrina and Gustav; after over thirty feet of water submerged the city and laid waste to the strongholds of some of the greatest jazz, funk, and blues musicians in the country; somehow, the city continues to rise up out of the water, dancing, waiting for the sound of the brass band to round the corner to join in with the second-line.