The Greatest Dancer

Who is the greatest dancer? There are many candidates for this title such as Fred Astaire who starred in films such as Top Hat and Funny Face. Perhaps we should also include Fred’s dancing partner Ginger Rogers who reportedly said she did all the same moves as Fred only backwards and on high heels. Candidates include Mikhail Baryshnikov, the Russian-American dancer, Michael Jackson, perhaps for his innovative styles including the Moonwalk dance, Isadora Duncan, known as the Mother of Dance and Anna Pavlova, the Russian ballet dancer, who also had a dessert named in her honour when she visited Australia.

There are many other candidates such as Martha Graham, who changed how Americans viewed dancing, Michael Flatley of Riverdance and Lord of the Dance fame, Madonna, one of the biggest selling popstars of all time and the Godfather of Soul James Brown, who was as good a dancer as he was a singer. Then there is Gene Kelly of Singing in the Rain and The Three Musketeers fame who was a major influence when he combined film and dance and invented new dance techniques. His co-star in Dancing in the Rain was Donald O’Connor and was himself a great but perhaps not so well recognised a dancer.

These dancers combined art and dance with athleticism and all invented new dance techniques that took dancing and the concept of dance into new and different directions. Perhaps this is why they are all still influential in their own way, to millions of dancers and fans worldwide.

However, in 1979 the all sister singing group Sister Sledge from Philadelphia, released an album called We Are Family which topped the charts in America. This album meant that Sister Sledge was now a mainstream commercial success at the peak of the disco era. Disco was a subculture dance music that originated in clubs frequented by the gay community, black community and women in New York City, Philadelphia and the northeast of America.

Disco was further popularised by the global success of the 1977 film Saturday Night Fever, starring John Travolta, as a working-class hardware store salesman who wins a dance competition. The film score was provided by the Bee Gees with an album also called Saturday Night Fever which is one of the biggest selling albums of all time. As a music genre, disco was now a global phenomenon and it is in this era that Sister Sledge released the single He’s The Greatest Dancer.

Image of Studio 54 Moon and Spoon Logo

The producers of the We Are Family album, Nile Rogers and Bernard Andrews, of disco giants Chic fame, wrote the song He’s the Greatest Dancer in 1979 and this was one of the first songs to name drop high end fashion brands with the line “Halston, Gucci, Fiorucci…”. The song is about the nightlife in Studio 54 and of the world’s first male super model Sterling St Jacques who frequented the club on a regular basis.

The song celebrates the dance moves that St Jacques invented and caused a sensation in the hedonistic New York nightclub scene. Famous guests who frequented Studio 54 such as Liza Minelli, Bianca Jagger and Jackie Onassis were mesmerised by his dance techniques. It seems that St Jacques was a dancer who stretched and pushed the concepts and boundaries of dance in the 1970’s disco club scene.

Studio 54 opened in the early part of1977; the year the subculture of disco became mainstream partly due to the film Saturday Night Fever and the Bee Gees soundtrack of the film. Everyone who was anyone went to Studio 54 including Truman Capote, Tennessee Williams, Elton John, Andy Warhol and his entourage, Diana Ross and Michael Jackson to name a few. These celebrities mixed with ordinary people from New York City as they all enjoyed the drug-soaked hedonism dance scene. Consequently, Studio 54 became the most famous nightclub in the world and was the centre of the disco dance scene in 1970s New York.

The nightclub owners, Steve Rubell and Ian Schrager, both of Brooklyn, took their idea for Studio 54 from the 1967 Woodstock music festival. They wanted to replicate the scenario where 400,000 people co-operated in an environment seemingly in peace without laws or police. Maybe, they surmised, laws were actually not needed and so the idea of Studio 54 came into being.

Disco Diva drag queen Divine and a future US president at Studio 54

As Studio 54’s permissive, over the top culture became known, it attracted the great, the good, the outcasts and the not-so-good. The drugs, sexual hedonism and the anything goes culture of the club was noticed by the authorities of New York City. Inevitably, in 1980 Studio 54 closed it doors after the owners, Steve Rubell and Ian Schrager, were jailed for tax evasion. However, in January 2017, President Obama pardoned both men when before he handed over the White House to Donald Trump who, coincidently, frequented the New York nightclub. After the jailing of Rubell and Schrager, the heydays of Studio 54 were no more and the dancing stopped.

So, who is the greatest dancer? That, as they say, is a three-pipe problem.

Addicted to Dance

Feel the heat, pulsating
beat, hypnotise with
those dancing feet,
shake those hips, pout
those lips, advertise a
night of bliss,
get in the groove, go through
the moves, no need to
talk, you’ve nothing to prove,
looking good, like you
should, they’d be like you
if they only could,
the floor’s your scene, you’re
a disco dream, the greatest
dancer the world’s ever seen.

Thanks for reading the blog and my poem and please leave a comment below as they are always appreciated. Dermot Moroney