We have seen the beguiling shapes made by female belly dancers, the enchanting moves of Flamenco women and psiren like manouvers stretching back through history that have brought many men to their knees.
In reply, us men have cut shapes on the dancefloor in pure rave throwback style, done the running man as well as MC Hammer, or offered up that untimely geeky looking “step apart, feet together” sideways shuffle… But at last we may have found some solace for our seeming inadequacies on the dancefloor… it is our turn to hypnotise using the medium of dance, and we don’t even need to put on some ridiculously high-pulled tight trousers and wear a sparkly unbuttoned shirt like those blokes off Strictly Come Dancing who seem to have females swooning with their camp displays.
Yes indeed, someone has decided this highly important subject needed researching, so psychologists at Northumbria University reckon they now know which dance moves are considered the most attractive by females.
This article at the BBC website states:
The researchers say that movements associated with good dancing may be indicative of good health and reproductive potential.
Their findings are published in the Royal Society journal Biology Letters.
“When you go out to clubs people have an intuitive understanding of what makes a good and bad dancer,” said co-author Dr Nick Neave, an evolutionary psychologist at Northumbria University, UK.
“What we’ve done for the very first time is put those things together with a biometric analysis so we can actually calculate very precisely the kinds of movements people focus on and associate them with women’s ratings of male dancers.”
Dr Neave asked young men who were not professional dancers, to dance in a laboratory to a very basic drum rhythm and their movements with 12 cameras.
These movements were then converted into a computer-generated cartoon – an avatar – which women rated on a scale of one to seven. He was surprised by the results.
“We thought that people’s arms and legs would be really important. The kind of expressive gestures the hands [make], for example. But in fact this was not the case,” he said.
“We found that (women paid more attention to) the core body region: the torso, the neck, the head. It was not just the speed of the movements, it was also the variability of the movement. So someone who is twisting, bending, moving, nodding.”
Movements that went down terribly were twitchy and repetitive – so called “Dad dancing”.
Dr Neave’s aim was to establish whether young men exhibited the same courtship movement rituals in night clubs as animals do in the wild. In the case of animals, these movements give information about their health, age, their reproductive potential and their hormone status.
“People go to night clubs to show off and attract the opposite sex so I think it’s a valid way of doing this,” Dr Neave explained.
“In animals, the male has to be in good physical quality to carry out these movements. We think the same is happening in humans and certainly the guys that can put these movements together are going to be young and fit and healthy.”
Dr Neave also took blood samples from the volunteers. Early indications from biochemical tests suggest that the men who were better dancers were also more healthy.
Oh come on Dr Neave, surely you can give us more than that… How about offering up the actual way to dance to look the most attractive, not just some general stuff. There are men crying out to know how they best move on the dancefloor… To hypnotise on the dancefloor, it just won’t do to start a formal induction, or take your pendulum out of your pocket, you’ll just look like a Svengali wannabe, which is scary at the best of times. Hypnosis on the dancefloor lessons then? Hmmm…
I think that the only real way to do this is for me to offer up what is surely as good as any instructional guide… A video compilation of the greatest dancer that ever graced the planet… The one and only boogaloo shrimp himself… Gentlemen, watch and learn from the master…
