MediaARTS Alliance in downtown St. Louis, Missouri, hosted this storefront dual video projection created on site, December 5 to12, 1999. The Salsa dance lesson was shot prior to my residency there, at Babalou on Yorkville Avenue inToronto. The Swing lesson was shot in St. Louis at the Casa Loma Ballroom.
When watching people learn to dance, it's quickly obvious that it comes more easily to some than to others.
In this work, I'm not proposing that there's a dancing gene. Still, it's never been disproven. Further, I'm not proposing that we learn to dance and then pass it on, but we teach many things to the next generation and the next in very subtle and complex ways. The "Baldwin Effect" that is referred to in dDNA is a theory in evolutionary biology, dating back to 1896 and still controversial today, in which a character or trait change occurring in an organism as a result of its interaction with its environment becomes gradually assimilated into the developmental genetic repertoire of the species.
But I'm actually not proposing anything in particular about either genetics or dancing. Rather, I'm interested in calling attention to the idea that dynamics at different organizational levels can resemble each other and inter-relate.
