Night Life: Slipping the Disque

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The Frug & the Bug. The Twist, nowadays, is for squares. In its place is an open-ended series of variations on the theme "stay put." For centuries, dancing involved some form of horizontal motion, but the population explosion has said goodbye to all that; on today's sardined dance floors, a couple can only stake its claim to a piece of ground and stay there, dancing as if in an imaginary phone booth. The feet are rooted to the spot, though there is plenty of motion—callipygian, pelvic, mammary, cranial and gesticulatory.

The pelvis gets all the play in the Frug, twitching sexily from side to side while the hands make slow and sensuous gestures. The Frug is not to be confused with the Bug, in which one dancer twitches and scratches his entire body as if infested with insect life, then passes "the bug" to his partner. The Wobble is a group dance like the Hully Gully, with charade-style steps and gestures such as the Push, the Frankenstein, the Popeye and the Barrel.

Charades, in fact, supply much of the variety in discotheque dancing, and most of them speak for themselves: the Monkey, the Pony, the Bird, the Snake, the Heat Wave, the Hitchhiker.

Like the Twist, most discotheque dancing keeps partners apart, but on the West Coast they are discovering that there is something to be said for ventroventral variations. Such are the Dog, the Fish and the Swim, which has been banned in at least one Cali fornia high school. And such is the newest—the GoGo.

The GoGo is the product of Los Angeles' two-month-old discotheque, the Whisky a GoGo. The head arcs back and forth, the arms chop up and down, the feet are planted. And the bodies, glued together abdomen to abdomen, endlessly twist, twitch and bounce. In a glass-walled booth suspended from the ceiling over the GoGo's GoGoing couples, a pretty eyeful slaps on new records and dances it all by herself. That way, it's called the Watutsi.

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