The Story Is Told
Flash Dance
Now I hear the music
Close my eyes I am rhythm
In a flash it takes hold
Of my heart
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What a feeling (what a feeling)
Being's believing (being's believing)
I can have it all now I'm dancing for my life (so dance right through your life)
Take your passion (what a feeling)
And make it happen (being's believing)
Pictures come alive you could dance right through your life (so dance right through your life)
For some, Flashdance will be the 1983 movie starring Jennifer Beals where Alex, an 18-year-old female amateur dancer who dreams of joining the Pittburgh ballet school and performs nightly at a dancing bar, works as a welder during the day. It is the classic story of overcoming the odds to finally find success. Eventually, Alex's obtains an audition for the dance school before five stuffy judges. She puts on a recording of "Flashdance... What a Feeling," starts her dance, stops and starts again. During the slow beginning of the song, the judges seem completely unimpressed and maybe even bored, but when the tempo picks up the stodgy judges begin to loosen up ....... Spoiler alert 1: While Jennifer Beals performed some of the dances, the complex dance numbers were handled by multiple body doubles. Spoiler alert 2: We are not told whether she passed her audition (but we assume she did). The audition clip is here.
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Put 'Flash Dance' into Google and the movie comes up. You have to scroll quite a way down to find 'Flash dancing'. 60 years before the movie, Flash Dance was a form of tap dancing (also called Jazz Dance at the time) that evolved in the 1920s–1930s, and which combined dance with acrobatics. Key exponents were the Nicholas Brothers - no 'doubles' here. Watch them in the 1943 movie Stormy Weather dancing with Cab Calloway's orchestra:
Self-taught dancers, Fayard and Harold Nicholas grew up in Philadelphia, the sons of musicians who played in their own band. At the age of three, Fayard would sit in the front row while his parents worked, and by the time he was ten, he had seen most of the great African-American vaudeville acts. In 1926 they gave their first performance at the Standard Theatre where their parents worked, then, in 1932, they became the featured act at Harlem's Cotton Club - Harold was 11 and Fayard was 18. "They astonished their mainly white audiences dancing to the jazz tempos of Bugle Call Rag; and they were the only entertainers in the African-American cast allowed to mingle with white patrons. They performed at the Cotton Club for two years, working with the orchestras of Lucky Millinder, Cab Calloway, Duke Ellington and Jimmie Lunceford.
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Fast forward to 2003, and rather than doubles, the start of dancing by mobs - Flash Mobs. First created in Manhattan by Bill Wasik, senior editor of Harper's Magazine, he is quoted as saying: "the mobs started as a kind of playful social experiment meant to encourage spontaneity and big gatherings to temporarily take over commercial and public areas simply to show that they could". The first attempt was unsuccessful after the targeted retail store was tipped off about the plan for people to gather. But the idea grew and now amazing gatherings of dancers and others stage flash mobs in many countries. It is 7.30 in 2016 at Antwerp's Grand Central station and this happens! They are not just about dancing either. Here is a Jazz Flash mob (with dancers) in Warsaw in 2014.
Take your passion (what a feeling)
And make it happen (being's believing)
© Sandy Brown Jazz 2026.4