Tennis phenom, Serena Williams, offered a brilliant example of virtuoso tennis playing on Saturday morning in the Olympic Gold Medal match against Maria Sharpova. For more than an hour, Williams gave herself completely in spirit, mind and body to the game that she now owns, having achieved a Golden Slam after winning all four Grand Slam victories and topping it off with an Olympic Gold Medal on the Wimbledon courts. Clearly, Serena Williams is making tennis history.
However, I am most interested in less than 10 seconds that followed her victory -- the brief bit of celebratory dancing that she did on the Wimbledon grass. Williams certainly is not the first athlete to celebrate victory in a dance (think T.O., Donovan McNabb's Moonwalk, or the Atlanta Falcon's Dirty Bird), but she is one of few women and certainly the only black woman to dance at Wimbledon. Serena's dancing in response to her decisive win performed publicly a moment of overlapping excess: excess joy and excess blackness.
To my eyes, her momentary performance reflected, as well, the Holy Dance, or Shout, that black folks across the Pentecostal church world do regularly to praise God in Sunday morning services, midweek worship and prayer meetings. It is said that Serena's dance is called the C-Walk, or Crip Walk, a popular dance done by young people at parties and featured on music videos. That may be true, but what grabbed my attention is how similar her dance looked to what so many black Christians do when they "cut a step" in a sanctified church. By sanctified church, I mean vlack congregations that are devoted to invoking the presence and physical embodiment of the Holy Spirit in their gatherings.
I am not claiming sanctified church roots for Serena Williams; in fact, I don't know if she is a person of any faith at all. Here, I agree with dance scholar, Brenda Dixon Gottschild in her book, "The Black Dancing Body," when she says:
"Danced religion ... reside(s) in African and African American history as well as in the Africanist collective memory ... a cultural unconscious that lives in the spirit and is reconstituted -- re-membered -- in the muscles, blood, skin, and bone of the Black dancing body."
In Pentecostal churches, like at Wimbledon on last Saturday morning, people dance in the spirit to express spiritual feeling. Also similarly, these holy dances are not recitals or shows given for audiences, but an embodied meeting at the intersection of the spiritual and the material. In other words, Williams played tennis from the outside in, but her Holy Dance came from inside and overflowed outward. This dance done without music or lyrics, in the rarefied air of Wimbledon, conjured up a sound, a beat (persistent bass), and a people (everyday black folks) not often embraced there. I applaud Serena Williams for her momentous tennis victories; but more so, I celebrate her for bringing her whole self -- spirit, mind and body -- to the game.
Helen Croydon: Can't Stomach a Grunting Female on Court? Go Listen to Yourselves in the Gym Guys!
David Fearnhead: Put a Sock in It Sharapova!
Matthew L. Skinner: Mark 3:20-35: What Makes a Family?
Rabbi Joshua Hess: Cameron Van Der Burgh's Immoral Gold Medal
| 1 | United States | 46 | 29 | 29 |
| 2 | China | 38 | 27 | 23 |
| 3 | Russia | 24 | 26 | 32 |
| 4 | Great Britain | 29 | 17 | 19 |
| 5 | Germany | 11 | 19 | 14 |
| 6 | Japan | 7 | 14 | 17 |
So why is this and who declared this a holy dance......and what really does holy mean anyway?
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/08/06/crip-walk-dance-serena-williams_n_1747593.html
This should get you up to speed regarding the C walk.
This article reminds me of Mormons who baptize people people after they are dead. Serena has never said anything about being Pentacostal -- she has explicitly stated that she belongs to the Jehovah's Witnesses. In my opinion, this is a form of identify theft.
And what does "excess blackness" mean, anyway? I was not aware that an optimal amount of "blackness" had been determined.
My interpretation of Serena's dance was that she was deservedly proud of herself and she was having a "Woop Woop! Look at me!" moment. It had nothing to do with a "Holy Spirit" or "race." It was an honest expression of her feelings at the moment. And she made me laugh with her, which was a gift I will always remember and appreciate.
How you go from comparing that to "Holy" dancing in the church I don't know.
And I say that as a Christian who has no problem with dancing in the church, for actual real Holy purposes, like when the Spirit of God overtakes you.
Not just because you had great day on the tennis court and you belt out a few gangsta steps.