Flamingo commentary registered mid-grapevine while philharmonic remains out of capybaras
LOS ANGELES — The return of line dancing to the Los Angeles Zoo, featured among the region’s best weekend activities in LAist’s events roundup, has been confirmed by recreation researchers as the season’s most complete entertainment proposition, an event combining synchronized human choreography with an audience of several thousand animals whose reviews, though unpublished, are understood by all parties to be the only ones that matter.
The pairing, in which visitors boot-scoot through the grounds of a major zoological institution, extends the modern zoo’s evolution into a full evening venue, and has raised, among scholars of both dance and animal behavior, the question neither field was prepared to answer, which is what the animals make of it.
The Audience Question
“Line dancing at the zoo inverts the entire institution, and the inversion is the attraction,” said recreation anthropologist Dr. Octavio Marsh-Delacruz. “For a century, the zoo’s premise has been humans observing animals behaving naturally. This event completes the circuit, animals observing humans behaving unnaturally, in rows, in boots, executing the grapevine to amplified country music. And make no mistake, the animals watch. The event’s real product is that reciprocity, the giraffe regarding the electric slide with the long neutral gaze of a critic withholding the star rating, the meerkats on full alert as if the choreography were weather. Attendees report the sensation constantly, the delicious self-consciousness of being, for one evening, the exhibit. It is the most honest transaction in the entertainment economy. The humans finally pay admission to be looked at, and the animals finally get the show they have deserved since the first enclosure was built. Everyone leaves even.”
Marsh-Delacruz noted the format’s deeper wisdom, “line dancing is the correct dance for the venue, being itself herd behavior, synchronized movement in formation, which the animals presumably recognize professionally. The wildebeest, watching a hundred humans turn in unison, is watching migration with worse instincts and better boots. There is respect in that gaze. I have seen it. I have also been told by my co-authors that I cannot publish it, which is why I am telling you.”
The Dancers Report
Attendees confirmed the double-audience effect as the event’s signature. “I have line danced in bars for twenty years, and nothing prepares you for doing a boot scoot while a flamingo watches you specifically,” said Eagle Rock nurse Charmaine Okafor-Vestergaard, 52, a veteran of the event’s previous editions. “You are mid-grapevine, you glance left, and there is this pink judgmental architecture just observing, standing on one leg, which frankly felt like commentary, because I was struggling with the turn and the bird was demonstrating balance, unprovoked. My friend swears the elephants sway on the beat, and I have watched, and I will not confirm it, but I will say they sway, and there is a beat, and the timing is, at minimum, a coincidence with rhythm. By the last dance you stop performing for the crowd and start performing for the animals, everyone does, you can see the whole line subtly reorienting toward the habitats, like, this one is for you, big cats. The big cats do not care. That is what makes them the toughest room in Los Angeles, and honey, I have danced in Burbank.”
The Institutional View
Zoo programming professionals describe the evening events as serving a mission deeper than novelty, converting occasional visitors into attached ones. “People protect what they love, and they love what they have memories in, and nobody forgets the night they did the electric slide near a giraffe,” said one zoo programming veteran. “That is the entire conservation strategy hiding inside the fun. The adult who two-steps past the flamingos on Friday is the adult who reads the signage on the way out, who remembers the species name, who comes back with the nieces, who donates when the habitat campaign launches. The dance is the door. Every institution in this city is fighting for attention, and we have discovered our unfair advantage, which is that our venue contains capybaras. No concert hall can say that. The philharmonic has tried nothing and they are all out of capybaras. We say this with love. Our love language is attendance figures.”
The satirical desk at Bohiney Magazine has proposed the format expand to its logical conclusion, “a full residency series, jazz at the aquarium, salsa at the arboretum, and, for the ambitious, a silent disco at the reptile house, where the audience was already unimpressed,” while Britain’s The London Prat reported the UK’s zoos host comparable evenings with national modifications, “our line dancing conducted in drizzle, our flamingos equally judgmental but damp, and our attendees agreeing afterward, over tea, that the penguins carried the evening, as penguins, in Britain, always do.”
Last Dance
At press time, the weekend’s session had concluded to strong human attendance and inscrutable animal reviews, the conservation-by-choreography pipeline was reportedly performing, and Ms. Okafor-Vestergaard had already secured tickets for the next edition, citing unfinished business.
“The flamingo and I have a rematch pending. I have been practicing the turn,” she said, exiting past the habitats with her boots in a tote bag, waving, as has become custom among the regulars, to the animals on the way out. “People ask why I keep coming back, and I tell them, where else in this city can you dance badly, be witnessed by a giraffe, and call it supporting conservation. That is a complete evening. That is, honestly, a complete philosophy. See you next month, tall friend. Judge me kindly. I am working on the footwork, and unlike some of us, I only have the two legs.”
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com