to perform in front of the entire community and invited guests. Many performed elaborate folk dances in gorgeous folk costumes. We found ourselves in a dilemma. What is an American folk costume? A cowboy outfit? A baseball uniform? Is square dancing really understood throughout the world as an American folk dance? Since I had the honor of leading the first American delegation to this camp, even ACTR, the American Council of Teachers of Russian, located in Washington was not sure quite what to expect and how to prepare us for the experience. We had to wing much of it. In the end, our folk costumes were much more modest than the gorgeous costumes many of the other students were wearing. We settled on blue jeans, white tee shirts, red arm-bands for the boys and red headbands for the girls to evoke our flag.
I suggested to the kids that rock and roll is a quintessential American art form and that perhaps we could do a series of rock dances beginning with the present and going back in time to 1960 and the Twist. The kids went with it. One girl, Annie, knew the Soulja Boy dance (At first, I thought it was a contemporary cover for the early Sixties hit, "Solder Boy," but I quickly found out differently! ) Somebody else knew the Electric Slide, and we could all fake The Twist. We made up signs for the three decades, and I ran out onto the stage and held them up before the kids started dancing. I joined in for The Twist.
We were a big hit! The next day everybody who saw me greeted me with a Twist movement. My students were driven crazy by their friends, from all over the world, who wanted to download the songs, especially "Soulja Boy," onto their iPods. Every day loud speaker at the camp played an international array of rock and folk music all day long. The day after our show, we must have heard "Soulja Boy" twenty times! My students assured me they had the clean version, and that's what we rehearsed to. However, the camp DJ had to download all the music played, and, unawares, he downloaded the vulgar version. The kids told me this only after our performance!
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