This Saturday, May 22nd, 2010, is the 4th annual Dance Parade. I recently sat down with Greg Miller, the Parade’s Founder and Executive Director, to talk about his own involvement in dance, the personal epiphany that led to the creation of the largest annual dance event in New York City, and the Parade’s connection to the city’s controversial Cabaret Law.
Part I
| NB: | Was dancing a large part of your life growing up? |
| GM: | Not really. I was one of those shy teenagers that kind of grew up and hit college, and beer loosened me up. I didn’t really get into dance until I went over to Europe and Asia. I lived abroad for nine years, so I kind of saw how the Europeans wouldn’t mind dancing by themselves in bars and clubs. At first that kind of struck me as odd, but finally I thought, you know, why not? And then I went over to India and went to parties where people danced all night and stuff like that. |
| NB: | What was it about dancing that finally won you over? |
| GM: | I guess just letting myself go and like being able to dance freely. |
| NB: | What was the first dance you became interested in? |
| GM: | Salsa, which is actually a dance I resisted when I moved to New York. I lived in the Lower East Side and that kind of tinny music always struck me as just being really trashy until I started traveling for the airline I worked for. I was a marketing analyst for an airline where I got free tickets. I was going to countries, in Latin America, South America, just for the weekend and I really got into salsa music, especially Cuban. Cuban is awesome. |
| NB: | So your impression of Salsa completely changed. |
| GM: | Completely. I came back and took classes at Sandra Cameron, Stepping Out Studios. Just going out to the clubs around town, Copacabana, and just being amazed at the artistry of the dance. I love how even though Salsa is a partner dance of two people, it can also be twelve partners dancing together interchanging each others partners. |
| NB: | What other kind of dances do you do? |
| GM: | I’ve done a ton of sort of holistic types of dance movement practices. I learned the five rhythms, Gabriel Ross. |
| NB: | I’m not familiar with that. |
| GM: | The five rhythms is a dance of five stages that’s deejayed or put to live music. It starts with “flow,” which is very grounded. They make the analogy that you’re kind of connecting to mother earth. And then it goes to “staccato,” which is faster, quicker, sharper beats, and then “chaos” which is where in a very uninhibited way you dance around the room. So it’s a lot of letting your head go, kind of a cathartic release. And then it slows down into “lyrical” which is a pattern dance, and it completes with “stillness” which is quite often body archetypes, shapes, stopping, starting. |
| NB: | How long is an average class? |
| GM: | It goes about two hours in usually two waves. The five rhythm, the whole movement is a wave and then they maybe teach in the middle and then go into a second wave. With one hundred, two hundred people involved it’s quite something. |
| NB: | In your bio you are described as being a social entrepreneur. Can you explain what that means? |
| GM: | Does it? I’m going to have to change that. (Laughs) It’s someone who wants to make a difference by being creative and by doing good in a way that is brought about by some kind of business means. The ideas out there, like there are these people that all they do is go around collecting vegetable grease from restaurants in New York City and they transform that grease into diesel fuel and they make a profit from it. So that’s like doing good and making a profit, or making it sustainable so you don’t have to rely on contributions from your constituents. |
| NB: | Yet when you graduated from college it was with a traditional degree in business. |
| GM: | It did have a little bit of a focus on international business. But of course all international business means is that you can speak a foreign language. |
| NB: | What kind of work did you do when you first got out of college? |
| GM: | I worked mostly in business kind of jobs starting of with the manufacturing company, Bosch, in Germany. Then Leahman Brothers in London, which is no more, and then PDS, a software database company in Japan, and then came back to the States in 1996. Then after that I worked for a Japanese airline for seven years. |
| NB: | For 18 years you worked mainly for Fortune 500 companies and then a few years back you made the switch to non-profits, why the switch? |
| GM: | It had to do with looking inside myself and really wanting to know what my passion was. What do I really want to do in life? You’re only here on the planet for a short time, right? So I did a lot of personal inquiry and I decided to try something I really liked instead of finance marketing, which had been a good way to fund my passions in the evenings and weekends, but a large part of the day I was just like grinding away in some cubicle somewhere. So I ended up doing a music film and theater festival called the “Fall Collection,” on the Lower East Side. And that kind of let me see the potential of what was out there and be creative in presenting art, presenting dance. The roots of the Dance Parade came out of another project, in between those two festivals, which was kind of more political which was the cabaret law movement. |
| NB: | There are a lot of people, including native New Yorkers, who don’t know about the cabaret law. Could you explain what that is? |
| GM: | The cabaret law in New York City was written into law in 1926 during a time when there was the prohibition era and a lot of racism. And it was also a time when there was jazz music, a quite new and popular art form had come out in New York City. And what happened was there was interracial dancing in these clubs and there was a backlash of conservatism. And the city legislated this law to not only control dancing but musical instruments around jazz. |
| NB: | What kind of instruments are we talking about? |
| GM: | Instruments like drums and trombones, trumpet, at the time, all that stuff was relatively new. They said for your venue you had to have a license to allow that type of music and to allow dancing. Even the customers had to be of good character. |
| NB: | What were the qualifications of good character? |
| GM: | It was one of those things that wasn’t clear. I did a lot of research. I worked with an NYU lawyer Paul Chivogny, who wrote a book about the whole law and actually took New York City to court and repealed some of the stranger things about music and being of good character. He’s an NYU law professor who was interested in working on the dancing component of the law and to take issue with the fact that it impacts our freedom, the freedom of expression, which is protected under the Constitution. Freedom of speech. So what happened was, in 1926 there was the law. It largely was uncontrolled. It wasn’t enforced. In the 1970s there were 12,000 of these licenses around New York City. It wasn’t hard to get one. But then Mayor Giulliani in the 1990’s used the law to close down some of the problem clubs, the big party clubs where they danced all night. He enforced the law saying we needed it more than in the past, plus, he made it very hard to get a license. They said you had to have all these fire codes and things associated with it. And then the community board got more involved in allowing the cabaret licenses to be renewed and allowed. So the end result was there were only 300 of them left in all five boroughs. Manhattan had only 70 that included hotels, restaurants and strip clubs. A very odd part of all this is that you can actually dance naked, which is protected under the freedom of expression. Some Supreme Court case in Dallas judged if you dance naked, it’s okay. |
| NB: | So it’s okay for someone to dance naked? |
| GM: | Inside a private venue. |
| NB: | You can dance naked and that’s okay, but you can’t dance with your clothes on. |
| GM: | That’s right. |
| NB: | Good to know. So where do things stand now? |
| GM: | You can still dance naked. (Laughs) |
| NB: | Getting past naked. |
| GM: | Before there were only two places in the world where you could not dance, Afghanistan and New York, and now you can dance in Afghanistan. |
| NB: | Why do you think the law remains unchanged? |
| GM: | Most people don’t know about the law and dancing is not considered a big need for society to protect. And then when Mayor Bloomberg come in to office he had the 311 phone line set up to answer anyone’s complaints. Of course most of the the complaints were about noise, car alarms, a neighbor’s music, and definitely any club that had music. As a result, the noise issue got the largest number of complaints. The city tried to address it which ended up cutting down on dancing even more. In 2006 Paul Chevigny and Norman Seagul, a civil liberties lawyer, who was head of the NYCW for twenty years, they represented four dance groups, not just the clubbers but swing dancers, salsa dancers and hip-hoppers that have a real art form. They represented them and brought them to the New York State Supreme Court, in the appellate court the second highest court in the state, the judge John Stallman, I think his name was, ruled that dance was not an expressive form of art. |
| NB: | In other words, they lost? |
| GM: | They lost. Music, film, theater, painting, and all that, is considered protected under the first amendment of the New York State constitution, which is the same as the federal, but the judge said he couldn’t tell the difference between dancing and aerobics or going up and down the stairs. As a result, it didn’t deem to be protected. Now this is in regards to social dancing. Onstage dancing is protected, but social dancing is not. The city won and they got to keep their cabaret law. And that’s where we are now. They tried to appeal it and that was about the time of the first Dance Parade. We were raising awareness about it. |
| NB: | I remember the original logo of a disco ball with a chain and manacle. |
| GM: | The idea of Dance Parade was to show in as many forms as possible that dancing is expressive. The first parade had about fifty forms of dance coming down Broadway in historical dance order. |
| NB: | Since then you’ve kind of moved away from the political side of things |
| GM: | We’re no longer focused on the cabaret law. |
| NB: | Why is that? |
| GM: | Mostly it’s a matter of our mission having changed. We think our mission is bigger than one city. |
| NB: | And that mission is? |
| GM: | The mission of Dance Parade is to inspire and educate the general public about the opportunities to experience dance and to celebrate diversity and unification in an annual parade and festival. A couple of years ago our organization gained 501C3 status. |
| NB: | How has that changed things? |
| GM: | For one thing, we’re recognized as an arts organization that’s tax exempt, meaning we can receive funding through grants. Having 501C3 status also does not allow you to have a political agenda. Technically you probably could have like maybe ten percent of your budget, but you can not lobby. And lobby means you can not try to change a law. |
| NB: | Do you see the cabaret law ever being repealed? |
| GM: | We feel eventually it’s got to go, it’s just a matter of time before people realize that it’s kind of a silly ordinance. |
In Part II of the interview Greg and I discuss some of the logistical problems in staging such a massive event, along with some of the financial challenges, and the group’s long term goal.
Excellent interview. Eye opening and stays open. Incredible dance laws from the mind numbing and evidently fully numbed in every other faculty of a State Supreme Court Judge. But, are we surprised, really?