Get Down and Boogie

Written by Gail Walter

Close your eyes for a minute. Imagine this: a shimmering dance floor, a lithe figure clad in a skintight white suit, left hip thrust out, right hand pointing skywards. The music throbs with an irresistible beat and your shiny, pointy-toed shoes just can’t stop themselves from tapping.

This was disco, an unprecedented phenomenon that emerged in the seventies with figures like John Travolta teaching us how to own a dance floor. They called it performance dancing because that’s exactly what it was. No more modest clinches on a modest dance floor that could barely accommodate four to six couples.

Going to a disco was like going on stage. Remember! The sixties were all about peace, love and haphazard dancing to music with a sometimes indiscernible beat. But, in the seventies, rhythm was reinvented. Music stopped being something you listened to and became something you had to dance to.

And if you were going to head to the disco you needed to spend time preparing that distinctive disco persona, the one that would shine when the strobe lights caught you strutting your stuff on the dance floor.

No longer was dancing something that a brazen few indulged in. Dancing was the whole point. The proportions of clubs changed from diminutive dance floors with ample seating area to the exact opposite. Now the disco club was all dance floor with scant room for those who were not there for the business of getting down.

Nothing exemplifies the disco culture more than the blockbuster movie, Saturday Night Fever. In it John Travolta plays a skinny Italian American kid whose entire personality is channeled through the movement of his audacious hips and feet. This was not Elvis with the old pelvic thrust. John Travolta covered distance on feet that moved like greased lightning.

He annexed space with a flamboyant choreography that required an audience. The tale was a simple but charming one. Down and out kid with no real future carves one out of an impressive talent for tripping the light fantastic. The movie touched a chord with everyone’s deep down desire to steal the show. It seemed that everyone had been waiting patiently to be freed from a spell that had restricted movement.

Disco dancing was not casual. It was flash and extrovert. If you weren’t dancing you were the audience. There was nothing in between. Mirror balls and strobe lights turned dark club interiors into shimmering showcases where everyone had an opportunity to shine.

Now a night out was like an aerobics session. You danced so much you lost weight, which was just as well because disco fashion left nothing to the imagination. You needed to be streamlined to wear the figure hugging polyester cat suits that clung to the body like a lover, or the latex little tops and tiny hot pants. Clothing was modeled on the outfits worn by modern dancers on stage and was so flashy and form fitting that it dared only come out at night.

Growing up during the transition into the disco era was like hearing something approaching from a distance, like a carnival. The slow but perceptible acceleration of the bass beat was a sign of the celebration to come.

I remember the moment when the world decided to get up and dance. One minute we were hiding out in the darkened corners of smoky clubs sipping at warm drinks and wondering what the point of it all was, the next we were present at the show of the century. Not only were we present, but we WERE the show.

It was like someone turned the music up and shone the focus lights on our little group in the corner. The strong repetitive bass rhythms were irresistible. It was impossible to sit still. For those of us who had always loved dancing and hated the small dance floors it was like the world had suddenly woken up to find music so deeply imbedded in its soul that it couldn’t keep still.

In Saturday Night Fever everyone danced to free themselves from the humdrum of everyday life. It was a ritualistic casting off of the shackles of mere existence, a way to celebrate life itself.

Now when you approached a disco you could hear the beat from several blocks away. The rhythm drew you in like a magic spell. People would start bopping as they walked along the sidewalk.

The soundtrack for Saturday Night Fever was a favorite at discos where whole dance floors of exuberant dancers would coordinate to reenact the triumphant dance scenes from the movie. But the Bee Gees falsettos were not the only rhythms that moved dancers in those heady days.

Donna Summer with her mesmerizing “Love to love you baby” and Gloria Gaynor with “Never can say goodbye” were there before John Travolta had even stepped out on the floor in his white suit. K.C. and the Sunshine band gave us the rousing “That’s the way I like it”, Abba told us we were all Dancing Queens while Alicia Bridges summed it all up in the disco anthem “ I love the Nightlife”.

Characterized by a dominant up-tempo bass beat of between 110 to 136 beats per minute disco music grew out of an exotic fusion of soul, funk and salsa rhythms. It was the modern urban equivalent of an ancient tribal beat that allowed a whole generation to shake the concerns of the time out through the souls of their feet and get down and boogie.