| 33 A Brief Discourse on
Dancing An
Egyptian officemate lately asked me, "What was that Filipino channel on satellite TV,
the one that frequently showed a flowing, colorful bird freezing on the TV screen?"
"TFC," I said, "The
Filipino Channel."
"You people certainly beat the
Egyptians in dancing and gyrating. And you have a lot of beautiful and sexy dancers. How
come you never build pyramids to your superstars?"
"Megastars," I corrected him. I
did not however immediately answer his question.
I have to thank my Egyptian friend for
setting my gray matter into motion for a few nights contemplating his question.
Yeah, how come we never did pyramids? Why
not?
After a few days, I saw him at the coffee
room again and I told him, "Dancing is so much easier than building pyramids,
that’s why."
This is not to trivialize dancing, or the
Art of Dancing, as some experts would prefer to call it. These connoisseurs would explain
to you the positive aura and the radiant energy that dancing enlivens, the good things it
can do to your libido, your nerves, your gall bladder, your culture, whatever, and the
beauty and grace of limbs and dresses and coiffure and flesh contorted in agony or ecstasy
or both. But if you ask me again about it, I'll take to doing lampaso any time
rather than the lambada.
I believe that dancing, more than anything
else among all the arts, exhibits, in the words of Adrian Cristobal, the unmistakable
signs of the exploitation of man by man. And I might add, the unmistakable signs of
fathers raping daughters on the rise.
Just watch any lunchtime show on Filipino
TV. A society which can feed its kids at meal time with sinuous flesh and the jiggling
lure of the axilla and the cleavage and the crotch and can see nothing wrong with this
deserves all the f...ing fathers that it can possibly send to the Formalin Room.
Between dancing and building a school,
I'll build you a school any day (just give me a second chance).
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