(superbowl special!) footloose and fancy freese

As already posted, I agreed to write an original dance as part of the grand prize for my friend Rob's NFL pool and post it during the Super Bowl. Rob was sporting enough to sweeten the deal by agreeing that if I posted the dance, he would perform it and upload the video to YouTube in time for the NFL Pro Bowl next week.

I've never written an original dance, but then again I'd never written an original recipe and that was what Rob had me do for the prize two years ago. As it turned out, I won the pool this year, so the task was to write a dance in honor of myself, which made the job all the greater challenge.

But, using the Holmes method of choreographic notation, I came up with the following sequence of steps. I call the dance "The Boy Detective":


(my official, original superbowl dance; click to enlarge)

The dance is meant to be performed to the Chicago Bears' 1985 "Super Bowl Shuffle", but experimentation here in the Freese Funky Kinesthetics Lab has shown that the dance can be done equally well to the B-52's "Rock Lobster," Outkast's "Hey Ya!", the Watson Twins' "Elementary Dear," or practically any of the peppier parts of Freaktoast J's Stickfigure Semiotica album. So Rob will have several songs to choose from.

Special note to Rob's life partner: Be sure to roll out the yoga mat or something the first few times he practices this, especially the parts where he has to backflip into a one-armed handstand. Remember the friend of his from college who started breakdancing to some Van Halen song at your wedding? How he hit his head on the floor during a backspin and knocked himself unconscious? [Everyone else: yes, true story.] Make sure this doesn't happen to Rob, and make sure he e-mails me once he's uploaded his video so I can link to it here.

the boy detective as autochoreographer

So, for the past four years my friend Rob has organized an NFL pool. The grand prize includes not just money from the other competitors, but also something original from me, to be posted on this blog. Only when Rob sends out his mass e-mail announcing the pool at the start of the season do I learn what it is that I will be expected to create. The first year, it was just an original haiku. Then, it was an original recipe. After that, he asked me to invent something on behalf of the winner (I would say "original invention," except thats redundant). This year, my task is to devise an original dance, to be posted at halftime of the Superbowl.

Anyway, today I clinched victory in the pool--my first win--even though the Superbowl is still three weeks away. Which means that now I have to come up with an original dance in honor of myself. Alternatively, partly in anticipation of this possibility, I've actually entered the pool under the name "Dorotha Harried," so I could create an original dance for someone else's blog pseudonym.

I don't have any idea what I'm going to come up with for this dance. More than this, I don't even know how one goes about posting an original dance on one's blog. Is there some standard dance notation? Should I draw little stick figures? Should I pay professionals and upload it to YouTube? Should I act it out with marionettes? Let me know if you have any dance or dance-representation ideas.

Also: So long as I'm previewing coming attractions, readers can also look forward to a Super-Secret Special Guest Poster potentially making a series of appearances soon.