Dance Clichés
Ever watched a dance routine on a TV show and thought it looked a bit too familiar? Yep, us too. So we compiled a list of the worst offenders...

Throw Your Hands Up In The Air!
Some dance cliches are so all-pervasive that they don't just invade the dancefloor, they take over the brains of the lyricists and force them to include a shout-out.

The line "throw your hands up in the air, [and] wave them like you just don't care" is one of the most overused lyrics in recent memory, and we've always found it slightly baffling.

Throwing your hands up in the air is all well and good, but when you're waving them around, what are you supposed to not be caring about? And how can you be sure that you're waving them around like you just don't care, or waving them around like you care passionately? It's got to be a close-run thing, surely?

But when all's said and done, this is less a dance cliche and more a footnote of music history. It's the best way to get the crowd involved, and you wouldn't want it wiped out, would you? No, you wouldn't.

The Hand Jive
Seen Grease? Then you know this one - a semi-complicated sequence of limb-flexing that takes place solely from the waist up (although you're free to move your legs around in a rhythm-free style if you like) and is best performed in total sychronisation with scores of people around you.

It's been sucked into into many dance crazes across the years (have a look at the clip of Whigfield's 'Saturday Night' routine for a demo) and indeed as a small section of proper professional type dance routines.

It's also been taken over by people on dancefloors the world over who are too 'tired' (drunk, in other words) to dance properly, and like to settle for 'big fish, little fish, cardboard box'. It's not all that sophisticated, but it's a move that everyone can take part in.

Ladies In Skimpy Costumes. Routine? What Routine?
Now, you'll definitely be familiar with this one. When a single (usually a dance single) gets released, and the act doesn't bother to perform it on the telly, but just sends a dance troupe out in its place.

And that dance troupe generally consists of women who aren't wearing an awful lot. So you think: "wow, this routine must be awesome! They must have worked on this for ages! It'll wow us all with its daring and physical-boundary-challenging use of the body!" And then...they do the hand jive.

Why? Because the big trick here is that no one is meant to care about the dancing, we're just meant to be looking at the ladies (or the men - it's an equal opportunities industry). Although the choreographer will usually have worked in a lot of reasons for them to keep bending over. Funny that.

The Robot
Currently being referred to in popular circles as 'The Crouch' after English football player Peter Crouch was spotted doing it as a victory celebration, but if we had to rename it after every single famous person who's been seen to do it, we'd have to call it The Blige, The Aloud, The Stevens, The Backstreet, The Timberlake, The...well, you get the idea.

This dance is popular because it's one of those ways that allows people who can't really dance very well to pretend that they can, because all the movements involved are MEANT to be stiff and jerky.

Ideally you shouldn't move your lower half at all, and you should hold your arms as though you're intending to balance a series of packing crates on your forearms. Cliched because: everybody in the world can do it. Think outside the ro-box a bit, eh?

Jazz Hands
Ah, lovely jazz hands. Beloved of musical theatre students everywhere, and immortalised by the episode of Friends where Joey's big lie on his CV ended up with him attempting to lead a dance class.

Jazz hands, for the newbies, are basically where you lean forward, get down on your knees if you like, put your wrists together and splay your fingers with your hands waving (making a sort of pink ten-legged spider). Often spotted at the end of a big dance number in a musical, but occasionally nicked by pop groups to add a bit of theatricality/pink ten legged spiders to a performance.

Plus, again: no vast amount of dance ability required.
Downsides: you can't do this move while wearing mittens, but the first person to e-mail us with a constructive reason why you'd be wearing mittens during a dance routine anyway gets a cookie (of the internet variety, of course).

Steve P
11/07/2006