That Time I Danced Thriller

So I was in a talent show. I know, shocking, right? I actually participated in art this time! I mean, that’s a very loose definition of art, but I did it, so that’s all that matters, right?

Here’s the skinny (seriously, why don’t people talk like this anymore, it’s so freaking cool): I’m in InterVarsity Undergrad, or IVU, a club/Christian group on campus. Our leader/staff worker/patron of silliness Jess was speaking at the weekly meeting of Asian InterVarsity, or AIV, one of IV’s chapters on campus, so naturally IVU had to attend. I mean, it wasn’t mandatory or anything, but you get the idea.

I don’t know if there’s any history behind it or anything, but AIV typically has a post-AIV thing that they do each week, and of course the week Jess was speaking they were having a talent show.

Now, I vaguely knew about this but I didn’t really know until my good friend Stefany emailed me (and everyone else in IVU) and informed us that AIV really really really wanted us to participate. The email was sent out Wednesday night. Thursday night IVU met for our weekly meeting. Friday night was the talent show.

As you can probably already tell, our “talent” was not very talent-y…and that’s being nice.

But I mean, we had a plan of action, so that counts for something, right? We were gonna use our talent of silliness as our actual talent, and by that I mean we were going to wing it the whole way.

We decided on opening with a game of “Raptor Tag,” which seems pretty self explanatory but I’ll explain anyways. You go around, hopping around like a raptor and with your arms close to your chest because “I have a big head and little arms!!!“ You try to tag other peoples’ arms without extending yours because you;re a raptor obviously, and when you lose both arms you’re out. It’s kinda like ninja meets tag meets playing raptor. In any case, we were gonna start with a mock game of that to confuse our audience. And then, once we’re all dead, Dean would give a raptor-y cry of victory, and as the beginning notes of “Thriller” sounded over the speakers he’d raise us from the dead, raptor zombies here to change the world and get funky.

This, in theory, sounds wonderful – we were gonna learn an easy, 20-30 second dance to “Thriller” and it was going to be flawless.

We had about an hour Thursday night and Friday night to learn and practice our dance. So I’m sure you can predict how utterly flawless we all were.

In reality, I was a beat ahead of everyone else, forgot the moves and couldn’t shimmy to save my life.

But the thing was, it didn’t matter. I was giggling, next to me my friend Hannah was red-faced and smiling, and the whole auditorium in front of us whooped and cheered when they heard the first beats of the iconic song. They didn’t care that we were off beat and could never live up to the perfection of Michael Jackson’s dancing, just like we didn’t care that the slam poetry section ended up being “We’re All In This Together.”

Usually, I don’t try to make grand statements about Art in my blog posts, but tonight, I’d like to try. That night, I realized something. Art is about community, about ideas being exchanged between people in a creative way. And that talent show I was in was all about community. By the end of the night, when I complimented Zander on his terrific HSM dancing, he graciously accepted and said to me and my friends “You guys should come more often.” That invitation, that acceptance of us even though we were outsiders, made me feel as though I had just built a community of my own. It made me feel that art, in it’s silliest, wildest, least choreographed, most unpredictable form, brought us together that night to soulfully sing “We’re All In This Together.”

Because we are. We really, really are.