How to lean back dance

Fat Joe Speak On The Jamaican Connection To His "Lean Back" Dance

Dancehall / Hip Hop / News

By Shirvan Williams On: October 6, 2022 11:31 PM

Shirvan Williams Author

It’s no secret that Fat Joe’s “Lean Back” dance move was heavily influenced by Jamaican dancehall culture.

Fat Joe shed some light on one of his biggest hit song and the famous dance at the 2022 BET Hip Hop Awards last week. The NY rapper explained that when he was making the track, Jamaican music was on the ascendancy in New York. It was the vibe of this music, which most likely would have been dancehall, that got him thinking that he needed a track “to rockaway, lean back,” to.

While creating the track, he decided that he should make a dance for it, and it was then that he knew he had a track that would go the distance. “We knew off rip, that thing was outta here. Every now and then you make a song that’s like, ‘Oh no, this is gone. This is outta here.’ Yeah that was it,” Fat Joe told Hiphopdx.

The track, which features Fat Joe with Remy Ma on the second verse, went on to top the US Billboard Hot 100 for three weeks, starting on August 21, 2004. It also topped the Billboard Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Singles & Tracks chart for seven weeks.

Globally the song was very successful for the Terror Squad leader reaching the top 20 in several markets, including peaking at No. 5 in Denmark. It remains one of Fat Joe’s most successful tracks to date, as it was certified gold in the US and silver in the UK. It also helped to take the Bronx native to places that he didn’t previously envision as well.

Fat Joe touched on one thing that came about because of the popular song, which he believes gave comedic rockstar Kevin Hart one of his big breaks. Fat Joe reveals that while on set for his cameo in 2003’s Scary Movie 3, he met Kevin Hart and found him hilarious. Hart was more of an extra at the time, but his jokes stood out, Fat Joe recalls. That’s why he chose to cast him in the “Lean Back” video.

“Then like two weeks later, I shot ‘Lean Back’ and I called him up. I said, ‘Remember the little funny guy? Let’s get him in the video.’ So he came in ‘Lean Back’ and that was his first big moment. Scary Movie made that all happen,” he added.

The origin of the dance has been disputed though. While Fat Joe said the inspiration came to him through inspiration, according to writer, radio host, and public speaker Bee Quammie it was she who gave him the direct inspiration for the dance back in December 2019.

She claimed that she snuck into a Club Bed in Miami when she was underage, and as she was dancing during the reggae set, Fat Joe asked her to teach him the dance. Using Twitter, she said that the dance was called the “Rockaway” and that Joe recorded “Lean Back” the following week.

A user asked her if she thought that the “All the Way Up” rapper owed her some cash for the inspiration, to which she replied: “He owes Jamaica money! I remember this ’cause I was a kid and Jamaicans were furious and I think a few artists made songs about it too. ”

A year later, in 2020, Elephant Man also said that he was the creator of the Rockaway dance and that Fat Joe stole his moves for the Lean Back. He made that claim on Magnum’s Spice It Up talk show.

“Fat Joe come and take rockaway, him no know weh it come from,” he said.

The instructions for the Rockaway dance move featured prominently on Elephant Man’s 2003 release “Blase.”

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Dance as a Philosophy • Episode Transcript • Arzamas

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Course What is modern danceAudio lecturesMaterials

Contents of the second lecture from Irina Sirotkina's course "What is modern dance"

It is believed that the goal of education is to get rid of imposed opinions, patterns, stereotypes. There are also many stereotypes about dance. Many people think, for example, that dancing is not an intellectual pursuit: intellectuals are not interested in dancing, and dancers do not read books. And it is also believed that it is better to dance than to talk or read about dance. Let's say right away: it's better - both. Moreover, one thing - dancing - is hardly possible without the other - without thinking, talking, reading about dance.

Stereotypes, alas, are peculiar not only to poorly educated people, but sometimes even to philosophers. Philosophy in the West and in our country has long ignored the body. The body has been the Cinderella of classical philosophy ever since, in the 17th century, René Descartes separated the thinking substance, res cogitans (or, literally, "the thing that knows"), from the material substance, res extensa, endowed only with the property of extension. Thought was thus incorporeal. But philosophers were only interested in it - thought. Already in the 19th century, Hegel declared that the subject of thought is an incorporeal spirit. This was probably due to the fact that philosophers took very little care of their own bodies and sat a lot.

Nevertheless, let's give Hegel his due: he considered sculpture to be the highest and most beautiful of all arts. And the favorite subject of sculptors is the human body. Hegel defined beauty as the conformity of form to an idea, as an expression of the eternal idea of beauty. These were the ancient sculptures of heroes, gods, sages-philosophers, whom everyone then admired. But dance is related to sculpture! Dance, like sculpture, is often classified as a plastic art. And at the beginning of the 20th century, a new dance appeared, which was called plastic. It is quite possible to imagine that dance is a sculpture in motion, plasticity is in dynamics.

Friedrich Nietzsche was the first to notice that in dance the body also becomes a work of art, which means that it also expresses an idea, a thought. Nietzsche literally turned classical philosophy upside down. And he did it not least with the help of dance. Like Isadora Duncan, Nietzsche loved antiquity and believed that in ancient Greece the highest stage of human development was reached - a golden age, which people then lost. In The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music, Nietzsche composes a real ode to dance - an ancient and eternally young dance: “... man ... is ready to dance into the airy heights. Witchcraft speaks with his body movements. …He feels like a god.” And in the philosophical poem Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche writes: "I would only believe in a God who could dance." His Zarathustra dances with nymphs in green meadows. For Nietzsche, dance becomes an attribute of the highest, divine art and thought. Therefore, dance for Nietzsche is a metaphor for thought. The divine lightness of the dance is opposed to everything "serious, weighty, deep, solemn" - in a word, boring; opposes "the spirit of gravity, by which all things fall to the ground. " Through the mouth of Zarathustra, the philosopher calls to "learn to fly", "to be light", "to dance not only with your feet, but also with your head" - that is, to be light and free in your thinking, just as a good dancer is free and light in dancing.

At that time, which is called the Silver Age in Russia, very many became Nietzscheans, spoke his language, using the metaphor of dance. The poet Andrei Bely dreamed that his works were "a dance of self-fulfilling thought." The same idea is echoed by today's Nietzscheans like the French philosopher Alain Badiou. For him, too, dance is “a metaphor for unsubdued, light, refined thought”, “a sign of the possibility of art inscribed in the body”. Free, unfettered, non-dogmatic thought is like a dance.

Nietzsche exclaimed: "And let the day be lost for us when we never danced!" The influence of this philosopher-dancer, not only on his colleagues in the workshop, but also on the dancers, can hardly be overestimated. Isadora Duncan loved to read Nietzsche and quoted him in her reflections on dance. She was not the only one: Nietzsche was also read by the German dancer, one of the creators of Art Nouveau, Mary Wigman. Wigman put one of her compositions on a chapter from Nietzsche's poem "Thus Spoke Zarathustra", which is called "Song-Dance". Maurice Béjart and many other dancers read Nietzsche. These are real intellectuals from dance, artist-thinkers. They created not only choreography, but also artistic manifestos and programs: Duncan wrote "Dance of the Future", Rudolf Laban - "The Dancer's World", Mary Wigman - "Philosophy of Modern Dance".

What was the Nietzschean idea of these outstanding intellectual dancers? First, in the criticism of everything artificial. Isadora passionately criticized ballet for its alleged artificiality, conventionality, and the harm it does to the body. And she herself presented an alternative - a "natural" dance, similar to movement in nature. His examples are not six ballet positions (that is, several positions of arms and legs on which the entire choreography of classical ballet is based), but “wave vibrations and the rush of winds, the growth of living beings and the flight of birds, floating clouds and . .. human thoughts ... about the Universe ... ". Duncan considered one of the manifestations of the extreme artificiality of the ballet that the movements in it are fractional, isolated, do not follow from each other, are not connected with each other and "are unnatural, because they seek to create the illusion that the laws of gravity do not exist for them." On the contrary, in a free dance, the actions “should carry in themselves a germ from which all subsequent movements could develop” - approximately in the same way as evolution occurs in nature. Dancing, Isadora believed, should be every person, and it will be his own, personal dance, corresponding not to ballet canons, but to the structure of his own body. In other words, she insisted on individuality, freedom, spontaneity in dance - motivating this by the fact that nature itself works this way. “Duncan is not just a name, but a program,” wrote one of her fans in Russia, art critic Alexei Sidorov.

German dancer Mary Wiegmann (real name - Marie Wiegmann) lived 86 years (1886-1973). By the way, this is far from the only case of longevity among dancers - it seems to me that these people, who were burning with their work, simply could not die and leave this work on earth. So, Wigman began to create her dances in a unique place - on the mountain of Truth, Monte Verita. This was the name of the community of artists, philosophers, anarchists, theosophists, vegetarians, nudists who set up a colony in Italian Switzerland, on the shores of Lake Maggiore. There at 19In the year 13, Rudolf Laban, the son of a field marshal from Austria-Hungary, arrived, who at that time was studying architecture in Paris. And here he began - like Zarathustra dancing in "round dances" - to lead his "moving choirs". It was like a pantomime performed by a group of people. Wigman, Suzanne Perrotte, and many other future dancers, creators of new styles - expressionism and modernity, participated in these "choirs" (where there was no music and songs, only movement and gestures). In the warm Swiss climate, they danced on the banks of Lago Maggiore, naked or half-clothed, celebrated mass to the sun, and thought up other rituals for the new, liberated humanity. What the colonists on Monte Verita offered - given that at that very time a fratricidal world war was going on in Europe, in which Christians destroyed Christians - was not the worst offer to mankind.

Almost all modern dance came from a small commune in the Swiss Alps. We have already mentioned Wigman - here she created her ingenious dance-rituals: she came up with her "Dance of the Witch", then she created the "Dance Song" to the words of Nietzsche, and later, with her students, staged "Monument to the Dead" ("Totenmal") . In her article "The Philosophy of Modern Dance" (1933), she wondered if classical ballet was possible after the World War. Wigman believed that dance should be updated - not only in terms of new movements, steps or steps, but also in terms of the seriousness of the questions that choreographers ask.

The Witch's Dance by Mary Wigman. 1920s

In addition to Wigman, other modern choreographers also began to address current political and existential questions, questions about life. Kurt Joss staged the contemporary ballet "Green Table" - about those negotiations that European diplomats failed, which led to the world war. Pina Bausch began to study with Joss - she later created her own dance theater in the German city of Wuppertal, one of the most famous in the world. In the 20th century, along with dance-entertainment, a dance-reflection, dance-satire appeared. This is the result of real intellectual dancers appearing—or, as in the case of Laban, intellectuals began to dance, to become dance artists.

They opposed themselves to the light entertainment genre that ballet was traditionally considered to be. It must be said that in the 18th and 19th centuries ballet served as light entertainment, divertissement: ballets in the theater were given in intermissions between two short operas or between two acts of an opera, and often it was called that - ballet divertissement (divertissement in French "entertainment") . To distance themselves from this tradition, the new choreographers called their style not ballet, but modern dance. Modern included Mary Wigman, Kurt Joss and other students of Laban in Europe, and in the USA Martha Graham and other dancers. In our country, modern dance began to develop successfully in 1920s, but was banned for ideological reasons. After that, academic ballet reigned for a long time, and other genres (except, perhaps, folk stage dance) became marginal.

At first, classical ballet remained aloof from the processes that took place in modern dance. However, here, too, choreographers-philosophers appeared who staged meaningful performances. Maurice Bejart also belonged to the dancing philosophers, or philosophizing dancers (he left us relatively recently, in 2007). His real name is Berger; he is the son of the philosopher Gaston Berger, who, in particular, wrote a treatise on Husserl's phenomenology. Maurice graduated from the Lyceum with honors in philosophy, and then he took and went to study classical dance. As in philosophy, he was also successful in ballet - despite his small stature and short legs, he performed the title role of Siegfried in Swan Lake.

In the mid-1950s, Béjart founded his first company and staged his first ballet, La Symphonie for a Solo Man (La Symphonie pour un homme seul) to "concrete music" by contemporary composer Pierre Henry. Specific music was an electronic compilation of musical fragments, sounds of nature and household noises - for example, factory horns. The music alone provoked the audience - there really was a scandal at the premiere. Moreover, the theme is not typical for ballet: existentialism, loneliness, anxiety. These sentiments, however, were very typical of those years when Jean-Paul Sartre was the most popular philosopher. Bejart, thus, immediately declared himself as a choreographer-philosopher. And five years later he finally read Nietzsche, and this reconciled his two strongest passions - philosophy and dance. And his dance changed, became more powerful, passionate and vital. Having created a new company - "Ballet of the 20th century", Bejart turns to ancient myths, in which movement, dance have a sacred meaning, and puts on the ballets "Orpheus", "The Rite of Spring", "Sacrifice".

In 1961 Béjart staged perhaps his most popular ballet, Boléro. Bejart's favorite dancer Argentine Jorge Donn, Maya Plisetskaya, Sylvie Guillem shone in it ... Bejart was not the first to turn to Ravel's music. In fact, this composition was composed by Ravel at the request of the dancer Ida Rubinstein. The ballet "Bolero" was staged for her by the sister of the famous Vaslav Nijinsky, the wonderful performer and choreographer Bronislava Nijinsky herself. The ballet takes place in a tavern, and in the finale, Ida jumped on the table and danced on it, surrounded by enthusiastic male patrons. If you have seen Béjart's "Bolero" (or you can watch it right now), then you know that this dance is also performed on a raised platform. But due to a completely different choreography, idea, mood, this dance is more like not drunken fun in a pub, but a very serious and passionate sacrificial ritual. Even Bejart's table is not a table, but an altar on which sacrifice is made.

Bolero. Choreography by Maurice Bejart, music by Maurice Ravel. Dancing Jorge Donn. 1960

Such was the increased seriousness and even sacredness of modern dance in comparison with its predecessor, classical ballet of the 19th century. It should be added that Bejart himself converted to Islam in the late 1960s, but Buddhism was also close to him. And he called his last dance schools "Mudra" (which means "gesture" in Hindi) - in Brussels, and "Rudra" (after the name of the deity) - in Lausanne. Over the past twenty years, Béjart has staged almost a hundred ballets, including, a year before his death, Zarathustra: Song and Dance. Zarathustra for him is a philosopher, a prophet, a legislator, a dancing god who dances with his feet and head.

More to read:

Badiou A. A small guide to inaesthetics. St. Petersburg, 2014.
Bezhar M. A moment in the life of another. Memoirs. M., 1989.
Valerie P. On Art. Soul and dance. M., 1993.
Duncan A. Dance of the future.
Nietzsche F. Thus spoke Zarathustra.

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- If you know the names of all the movements that you dance, then you are either a beginner or an international class dancer.
Dassi

- If a dancer wants to show that there is no gravity, then this is ballet. If the dancer seeks to show that gravity oppresses him, then this is modern. If a dancer seeks to show that he is ready to die in the fight against gravity, then jazz.

"Dance is life..."
Isadora Duncan

"I would only believe in a deity who could dance!" (Nietzsche)

The desire to move in response to an emotion is a physiological fact that will always exist as long as people live. The existence of rhythm and its direct connection with life and with sex is obvious, when rhythm and movement are combined together, dance is born. (Victor Sylvester)

Dance is the loneliness of people who do not need words.

Ettore Scola
Dance is a way to achieve beauty, to control every muscle and direct it to happiness.

Maurice Béjart
Dance is sculpture in motion.

H. D. Sorell
If you are not invited to a white dance, do not be upset - be a man . ..

V. Sumbatov
If a girl dances badly, she scolds the orchestra.

Hebrew proverb
Only those who dance with their bare feet on thorny grass really like to dance.

Thomas Fuller
And the little mermaid danced and danced, although every time her feet touched the ground, she was in such pain, as if she were stepping on sharp knives. And her eyes spoke more than the songs of slaves.

G. H. Andersen
The body never lies.

Martha Graham
Dancing is a vertical expression of horizontal desires.

George Bernard Shaw
I have discovered the art of dance, an art lost two thousand years ago.

Isadora Duncan
Tell me who your teacher is and I will tell you what you can become.

"you want to die?! but you know how to dance?! no, then how do you want to die if you don't know how to live?"
Hermann Hesse

We don't know much about ourselves until we start moving!
Paul Schilder

"Consciousness expresses itself through creativity. The world in which we live is the dance of the Creator. Dancers come and go in the blink of an eye, but the dance lives on. Very often, while dancing, I feel the touch of something sacred. In at such times I feel my soul soar and become one with all that exists

I become the stars and the moon I become loving and loved I I become a winner and a loser. I become master and slave. I become a singer and a song. I become knowing and knowledge. I keep on dancing - this is the eternal dance of creation. Creator and creation merge in the fullness of joy.

I keep on dancing…and dancing…and dancing, because there is only…dance..”
From the book of Michael Jackson

The human body is the same instrument that can be used to express music through dance.
Dance is expression music...

You can be silent and not utter a word, but a gesture will be enough to express your feelings... one step or hand movement.

And we express ourselves through dance. The most impenetrable face will become an open book when a person starts dancing. .. All the most hidden desires and fears can be seen in a person when he dances, even if he really wants to hide it...
Don't dance if you have something to hide!
And dance and enjoy the dance if your soul sings...

Dance is an expression...
Dance is your pulse, your heartbeat, your breath. This is the rhythm of your life. It is an expression in time and movement, in happiness, joy, sadness and envy.
Only those who dance with their bare feet on thorny grass love to really dance.
Dance until you are told "Well, you still dance."

“There is no greater reward than the moment when a work comes to life on stage and speaks for you what you want to say… there is no greater reward than to feel how the audience is absorbed in your work, to see how they are briefly immersed in your world, to hear their laughter - when it is necessary - and to understand that what is happening on the stage does not leave them indifferent.
Maresa

O higher people, your worst thing is that all of you have not learned how to dance, how to dance - to dance on top of yourselves!
Nietzsche

Dance is the only art for which we ourselves serve as material. Ted Sean

And although there is a quagmire and thick sadness on earth - but whoever has light feet runs over the mud and dances as if on cleared ice.
Nietzsche

Raise your hearts, my brothers, higher, ever higher! And don't forget the legs too! Raise your feet also, you good dancers, and even better, stand on your head!
Nietzsche

Dance - happiness and pain.
Gabriela Komleva

Dance is a verse in which every movement is a word.

Dancers are God's athletes.
Einstein

Dancing is the art of pulling your foot before your partner steps on it

Art, like life, is beyond the reach of the weak.
Block

The goal of creativity is self-giving,
Not hype, not success.
Shameful, meaning nothing,
To be a parable on everyone's lips.
Pasternak

Do not be afraid of perfection!
It doesn't threaten you at all.
S. Dali

To create means to kill death.
Rolland

All arts serve the greatest of arts, the art of living on earth.
Brecht

Know how to love art in yourself, and not yourself in art.
Stanislavsky

If I could tell you what it meant - there would be not point in Dancing it.
ISADORA DUNCAN.

What? You are looking for? Would you like to multiply yourself tenfold, increase a hundred times? Are you looking for followers? - Look for zeros!
Friedrich Nietzsche

Life is short,
But the path of art is long,
Opportunity is fleeting
Experiment is dangerous and judgment
Difficult.
Hippocrates

This is how I want to see a man and a woman: him - capable of war, her - of childbearing, but so that both of them can dance - not only with their feet, but also with their heads.
Nietzsche.

"We must consider lost every day in which we did not dance at least once."
Friedrich Nietzsche

"The true essence of a people is in its dance and its music. Bodies never lie."
Agnes deMille

"To dance is to lose your temper. To become bigger, more beautiful, stronger."
Agnes deMille

"Dance can reveal all the secrets that lie in music."
Charles Baudelaire

"Common sense and a sense of humor are the same thing, only they move at different speeds. A sense of humor is dancing common sense."
William James

"Ballet technique is very capricious and difficult. Mastering it is never easy - it is only possible. To "make" a dancer's body, you need so long and relentlessly, sometimes painfully, to work on it, so much effort is spent on something to maintain the dance technique, that if you do not get a certain satisfaction from discipline and punishment, then it is impossible to withstand this tension.
Agnes deMille

"Similarly, there are three types of dancers: the first, those who regard dance as a kind of gymnastic exercise consisting of impersonal and graceful arabesques; the second, those who concentrate and commit their body to the rhythm of desired emotions, transmitting learned sensations or experiences. And, finally, there are those who turn their body into a brilliant stream, an element completely subordinate to the movements of the soul. "
Isidora Duncan

"The essence of dance - and I still have to define the concept of "essence" - consists mainly in movement. Of course, you will immediately object that basketball is also associated with movement. first of all. The actions of a basketball player are a means to an end beyond movement. In dance, in fact, movement is an end in itself, it has no purpose other than itself."
Alvin Nicholas

"If one had to define the most important trait that a dancer should be endowed with, the options would be enormous. Beautiful body, grace in lines, generosity, joy in work, ability to please, unshakable integrity, unbending pursuit of some abstract perfection Of course, all these qualities determine the personality of a dancer, and each element exists in combination with others, and this combination shows us the artist."
Lincoln Kirstein

"I will turn an average person into an average dancer, provided he has certain data. I will teach him how to move his arms and legs, how to turn his head. I will give him stability, brightness and speed; but I cannot give him those fire and understanding, those elegance and expressiveness, which is the soul of real pantomime.
Jean-Georges Novaire

"A choreographer cannot force the audience to love ballet, he must proceed from his inspiration. He must believe in ballet, let it stand on its own feet or fall from its own weakness. If the audience accepts ballet, then this time the choreographer is lucky!
Gerald Arpino

"I love dance passionately, with all my heart. I struggle, I get tired, I lose heart. But what always resurrects me ... is a new surge of strength every time the creative process is restored and artistic activity begins to unfold, even if it is insignificantly small doses."
Ann Halprin

"A dancer is born. No teacher can work a miracle, no amount of years of study can make a good dancer out of a mediocre student. Some technical skills can be acquired, but no one can ever "acquire exceptional talent.