!VAR HAGENDOORN

Tractor Square Dancing

This may very well be the best tractor square dancing you will see this year. Unfortunately, the video was pulled from YouTube and I've got no idea which one it was... However, I found this one and this one.

Forget about kwaito, kuduro and baile funk. Parkour and free running? That is soooo 2006. In case you missed it, tractor square dancing is the latest dance craze, or at least in the South of the U.S. Tractor square dancing is also pretty big on YouTube. Here's another video.

I'm pretty sure that if a Dutch or German artist had come up with this idea he or she would have been granted a subsidy to perform it at a major performing arts festival. A short clip of Karl-Heinz Stockhausen's Helicopter String Quartet, which premiered in The Netherlands (where else?) and was awarded a German music prize.

Actually, I don't think tractor square dancing is as wacky as it may seem. OK, it is wacky, but historically it isn't. In 16th and 17th century Italy horse ballets or equestrian ballets were all the rage. In large outdoor arenas costumed horsemen would ride their horses in intricate geometric patterns or reenact famous battle scenes. With the advent of opera and ballet the tradition vanished although in diminished form it lives on at the Spanish Riding School in Vienna. Since in many parts of the world the "iron horse" has largely replaced the horse as a means of transportation one may wonder why it took until recently before tractor square dancing emerged.

Links

Helen Watanabe-O'Kelly (1983), The Equestrian Ballet in Seventeenth-Century Europe: Origin, Description, Development. German Life and Letters, Vol. 36 Issue 3, 198 - 212.