Can you help me find this line dance?

February 6, 2007 8:07 PM

Can anybody help me find a video I saw online a long time ago? I'm pretty sure it was Japanese, but it involved a sort of line dance starting with one person doing a set of moves, then adding another person doing the same set at a different time, so everybody is in line forming this interlocking dance thing. Thanks!

I remember the video took place outside, and eventually showed a version with a bunch of ninjas doing it. That's about all i can remember though. My Google skills are failing me.

posted by bonesy to computers & internet (16 comments total)

Ninja Dance!

or 'google algorithm dance'.
posted by zengargoyle at 8:28 PM on February 6, 2007

awesome thank you so much!
posted by bonesy at 8:31 PM on February 6, 2007

also, a search 'algorithm taiso' on YouTube will bring back lots of results.
posted by zengargoyle at 8:33 PM on February 6, 2007

That is damn cool.
posted by dirtynumbangelboy at 8:55 PM on February 6, 2007

The Algorithm March is a recurring segment of the Japanese children's show Pythagoras Switch, which also created the excellent Rube Goldberg-esque machines you've probably seen videos of.

It seems to be often used as a standby, and has had many different people doing it, including soccer/futbol teams, researchers at the SOUTH POLE, and even 967 inmates in the Philippines. (There were also videos with flight attendants and Sony QRIO robots, but YouTube took em down.)

Brand new MeFite here, by the way :)
posted by Hargrimm at 9:32 PM on February 6, 2007

I'm liking that.
posted by tellurian at 9:39 PM on February 6, 2007

If you pop into the NHK studios in Shibuya, they have it playing in a loop.

Having said that, I like they can show Ninjas in a kids tv in this country, and frequently do. Not like the UK where it has to be "teenage mutant hero turtles" even though it is a foreign word to them.
posted by lundman at 10:01 PM on February 6, 2007

Wow, good work Hargrimm. I'd seen the original, but those other videos are something else!
posted by MetaMonkey at 10:08 PM on February 6, 2007

Norman McClaren did that first. His were really a lot more clever than that, too. Like this, it was a sequence which a single guy (him) did a bunch of weird stuff, and he used a film printer to iterate several copies of the sequence together, in staggered phase. When you saw it together it included things like one guy kicking the one in front of him in the butt, and the other guy staggering a few steps, turning around and taking a swing as the first guy, who ducks, and so on.

At a certain point in it he starts crossing us up. For instance, he recorded a second sequence where the guy who tries to take a swing stops before doing it. He also recorded it using a woman. And so he mixes those up, using the film printer (this stuff having been done something like forty years ago).

There was a site posted on MeFi recently which had a collection of McClaren's stuff. I wonder if that one was one of them? I don't have a clue as to what this particular one was called. It was a long program, because he included several variations on that basic concept.
posted by Steven C. Den Beste at 10:10 PM on February 6, 2007

That is awesome!
posted by Brittanie at 11:44 PM on February 6, 2007

Norman McLaren's Pas de Deux involves dancers on a black set, with optical printing to convert their turns and moves into elaborate abstract shapes. It's beautiful and worth seeing, but it's not in the same spirit as the other videos mentioned here.
posted by ardgedee at 5:50 AM on February 7, 2007

That's not the McLaren piece I was talking about.

The word "round" in music refers to pieces usually intended to be sung where several groups simultaneously sing out of phase. "Row row row your boat" is probably the most famous one. The McLaren piece I'm referring to was intended to be a kind of visual round, and in fact there was music associated with each incarnation. In one case the image of one of the people was printed upside down, and the music was played upside down too.
posted by Steven C. Den Beste at 11:31 AM on February 7, 2007

Doing some googling, I think it might have been "Canon" from 1964.
posted by Steven C. Den Beste at 11:38 AM on February 7, 2007

Here's the video Steven C. Den Beste is talking about. Go to about 4:20 in.
posted by MsMolly at 12:16 PM on February 7, 2007

That's the one! I also remember the blocks on the chessboard!
posted by Steven C. Den Beste at 2:42 PM on February 7, 2007

wow those were bad ass, thanks steven c. den beste, mamolly, and ardgedee
posted by bonesy at 10:50 PM on February 7, 2007