Party mood: dance on the volcano

The corona pandemic has imposed many sufferings on people, but it has also relieved them of some.

Especially from dancing.

To be honest, there are very few people who look good aesthetically when they dance.

Measured against this, far too many feel called upon to do so.

Timo Frasch

Political correspondent in Munich.

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On - thank goodness - the smallest flame you can observe at jazz matinees.

The visitors tend to sit discreetly in their chairs, after all they consider themselves elegant because of their taste in music, but everyone owes it to themselves and the person sitting next to them to at least snap their fingers or purse their lips in the expected rhythm and at the same time to move your head back and forth like the late Mirco Nontschew in his parodies, in short: to groove along.

It is very important to act as if you couldn't help it, as if you were a

, an enlightened one, but with unbroken contact to the roots of our existence.

Dance party equals good party?

The image of dancing is surprisingly good.

Parties are only considered successful when, to the annoyance of the neighbors, 30 people on one leg and playing air guitar derwish through the empty living room to REM's "It's The End Of The World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine)" at 3am.

Every year there is a fuss about the ban on dancing on Good Friday - and it should be understood as a redemption before Easter.

But the best are couples who have just been on vacation to Cuba for two weeks.

No salsa party, whether in Schwäbisch Hall or Bad Honnef, is safe from them.

You have to talk about cultural appropriation.

People with near-death experiences sometimes describe looking at themselves from the outside.

You can have that less dramatically when dancing.

Contrary to the cliché, on the dance floor, very few are really involved, but most are literally beside themselves, which Farin Urlaub has poured into immortal verses: "Is that your ass or mine / I've lost track / And I'll say one thing stands impeccably firm / I wasn't born to dance."

A special case is going to a concert or a festival, which is possible this summer like never before, because every existing band is on tour.

The rule of thumb applies there: the fuller it is, the better, because the less people can move, and therefore dance.

In the grandstand, however, this best way out for everyone is blocked.

Suppose a rock band is playing.

Then, sooner or later, the question arises: stand up or stay seated?

You want to stay seated, that's why you paid for the grandstand.

On the other hand, you want to show that you still have rock 'n' roll in your blood.

So up.

Now you can no longer sit down, that would be something of a capitulation.

It's the same with clapping.

Once you start, you can't get out at least until the end of the song,

Gabriel García Márquez once said that every human being leads three lives: one public, one private, and one secret.

The dancing is a mixture of public and secret.

You turn it inside out as you do it - and 80,000 people in a stadium can see what you usually only do drunk in front of the bathroom mirror at two in the morning - or in bed.

As the very good dancer Sophia Thomalla said in the FAZ interview: Good dancers are also good in bed.

There may be something to it - but otherwise the great, yes, the fair thing about dancing is that it is very difficult to assess from the outside who is good at it and who is not.

According to studies, beautiful people may have better jobs, people with better jobs better earning and slimmer partners, but whether they can dance is a completely different question.

Sometimes you can't even answer them when the rich, beautiful and powerful dance, because they tend to take refuge in fake gibberish and then ironically say "dance" or, in the old days, "shake a leg".

Approaches of this could also be seen in the much-noticed dance by Friedrich Merz at the summer party of the CDU/CSU parliamentary group on Wednesday.

We're not going to step on slippery ice here and claim that the Global South is finally getting its due on the dance floor.

But it's always nice to see when, for example, in the "Latin Palace Changó" in Frankfurt's Bahnhofsviertel, the Latin ladies from the whorehouses walk in and with a single swing of their hips make all the bankers and alleged cultural workers look old and white as cheese.

What can happen again in the "Changó" after the Corona break is truly the reversal of the situation.

Maybe the Documenta organizers should go there.