All Day Girl Talk Girl Walk

All Day Girl Talk Girl Walk

Davey Davis: All Day Girl Talk Girl Walk

Concurrently with the Arab Spring, Rome burning, and the disgruntled masses rising together against Wall Street, the hyperactive laptop musician Girl Talk released a seventy-minute mash-up that compels one to shake one?s booty off, and some dancers hit the streets of New York to do exactly that. Girl Walk // All Day, the resulting marathon music video, is a dance-for-the-camera epic that profiles the city and the joy of movement. Anne Marsen plays the Girl, who exuberantly and grinningly jives her way across Manhattan, from the Staten Island Ferry up through Chinatown, with a cameo or two in Harlem and beyond. She is impish and empathetic, quickly mimicking the body language of passerby and smiling at them, willing them to play, rebuffed and sad when they will not. Director Jacob Krupnik moves in, out, and around the action, interlaying long, dynamic shots with details and cutaways.
He has an excellent eye for staging, spontaneously creating Victorian detail and presentation out of rows of benches or payphones. Attention is paid to each musical shift, which ushers in a new style, a new troop of dancers, or a sweeping camera move.

An hour-plus dance-off has the potential to become painfully tedious, but new tricks keep the pace moving forward. Just as downtown is getting a little boring, an orange Vespa shows up and swings the action to Times Square, then across the Williamsburg Bridge. Here Marsen?s visual language switches from bouncy dancer to Tank Girl?snarling faces and slobbering tongues. Later, out of nowhere, atypically bodied dancers in flower costumes drift through a graveyard, creating a moment of eerie, mime-like airlessness.

Girl Walk // All Day is a tremendous piece of energy and stamina, once you get past the jaw-clenchingly awkward first few minutes. So much so, in fact, that the piece transcends simply being a good, lengthy YouTube gimmick and lurches into the world of fine art. It tangles in enough threads to touch at the core of the social upheaval going on in New York and beyond. Pretty heavy stuff for a mash-up artist and a giddy girl in a hipster windbreaker.

The people in the video are not just going out and dancing; they are going out and dancing in a huge jumble of other people, people with routines, day jobs, places to go. Amazingly, in location after location, the passing lawyers, department-store managers, and utility workers play their part and ignore the gyrating, flashy characters before them. The city toggles between blasé obliviousness and direct response, resulting in an artistic piece that is one part constructed reverie, one part interventionist performance. In the middle of the third video, Marsen pulls around ten women into the movement, organically building up a chorus line for a strutting, feminine cross of Beyonce’s ?Single Ladies? and M.O.P.’s ?Ante Up.? Pure big-city connective beauty.

Equally striking is a short montage of Dai Omiya tapping on the Wall Street Bull?s dynamic back for a couple of tourists?before the barricades went up, some nice (and perhaps unintentional) foreshadowing. It is not such a stretch to draw parallels between this spontaneous breakdown of social distance in the pursuit of creativity and the Occupy movement.

Girl Walk gets at the rising, euphoric love that creative expression can allow us access to, those moments of smiling interconnection that break up urban isolation. These breaches of the collective peace are crucial in overcoming the insecure barriers we have been taught to maintain, which leave public space ripe for co-option by the highest bidder. If people continue to assert and express themselves, then the city is still open to change, development, a forward dialogue.

A less lofty part of that emerging dialogue has taken place digitally in the rancorous underworld of comments on Gothamist, which ran a series of posts on Girl Walk. Some people really do not like seeing this girl dance. A disgruntled core takes issue with the fact that the dancer has the audacity to step outside the status quo for a moment to insist on people?s attention. They quip that the project is arrogant, self-entitled, masturbatory. But what Marsen and Krupnik have done is completely available for other people as well. If people find Girl Walk too cutesy, too white, or too hipster?or just plain not good enough?then those people should come forward and assert the space for themselves. Just as in the realm of protest, once a space or idea has been liberated, the next step is to encourage participation from others with something to say or grievances to address.

Luckily for all of us, the public forum is, well, public. It is easy, however, to reject public expression when you don?t feel empowered enough to do so yourself. My hope is that with more projects like this from a variety of different viewpoints, more people will feel enabled to contribute to the public forum. Throw something out there, and let people respond. Color and noise can be more interesting than playing by the rules, which are rigged to begin with.

The full series is available on the Girl Walk // All Day website, and the creators are rolling out a tour with the show. Tune in or help host a screening if you appreciate the endless dance tunes?or if you have ever wanted to do this to a subway car:

And keep dancing in public.