1000s Shimmy, Shake & Wobble at 20th Annual NYC Dance Parade

The streets of Chelsea, the East Village and points in between sprung to jubilant life on Saturday May 16 for the 20th annual NYC Dance Parade. Despite its size, style and crowd-pleasing exuberance, the event remains a lesser-known highlight of the Manhattan parade calendar, and one that rarely attracts much press coverage.

Unlike most other parades, the NYC Dance Parade is born of no single holiday nor historical event, nor does it represent any one nation or culture. Rather, it proceeds under the larger aegis dance culture in general, across all eras, and traditions, from ancient Greece and earlier to the latest contemporary hybrid styles of the streets and creative choreographers. This is the parade’s great strength. The organizers’ claim that “we keep historical dances alive, like Armenian Folk dancing and Bolivian Caporales, and showcase new dance forms like Litefeet, Waacking and Brazillian Zouk.”

Founded by Greg Miller in 2006, the event is today run by the non-profit organization, Dance Parade New York, of which Miller is the Executive Director. The theme of this year’s event was “The Beat Goes On.” The meaning of this phrase was explained as follows, and will sound familiar to anyone who knows the convoluted story of New York City’s cabaret laws, which effectively banned dancing in many venues and were on the books from 1926 to 2017: “We recognize that dancing has not always been a First Amendment right and needs to be.”

The Grand Marshals of this year’s parade were Joan Myers Brown, Timmy Regisford, Christine Jowers and Jeff Selby. At a pre-parade rally at City Hall the previous Thursday, Selby danced his way down the steps of the edifice like a long-lost Nicholas Brother. (See the 1936 film “Stormy Weather,” with the Nicholas Brothers dancing as the Cab Calloway Orchestra performs beside them, for one example of their brilliance.) Present for both this warm-up event and the parade proper were Jeffrey Garcia, Executive Director of Mayor’s Office of Nightlife (a holdover from the Adams administration) and Harvey Epstein, the booty shaking City Council member in whose District 2 the parade would parade end.

The line of march– though one might also call it the line of boogie, cake walk, cha-cha, merengue, rhumba, waltz and all that jazz– began at Sixth Ave & West 17th Street. Weather was near perfect: sunny, with temperatures rising to the low 80s, encouraging ample bare skin with little fear of heat prostration. Besides the panoply of bouncing, bounding, spinning, whirling dancers, there were also floats, including five from the NYC Department of Youth & Community Development, with kids elementary and middle schools riding upon them; stilt walkers; jugglers; roller skaters; and circus arts perfomers. Among the identifiably national dancers were persons representing Brazil, Japan, Italy, Philipines, Serbia, Columbia and Paraguay.

Numerous dancing schools were also in attendance, including Xianix Barrera Flamenco and Niall O’Leary School of Irish Dance was present though the latter didn’t appear to jig.

The route of the parade, which ran from noon to 4 p.m, was a simple “L” shape but an effective one, proceeding down Sixth Avenue to West 8th Street, then turning east, passing the grandstand at Astor Place / Fourth Avenue and continuing to Tompkins Square Park. Here, from 3 p.m to 7 p.m., there was an ebullient post-parade Dancefest including five stages, free dance lessons, DJs, acrobats and the ever welcome, however sweaty and exhausted, “more!”