Dancing Through the Dystopia: Notes on Our Present Peculiarities

While “The Safety Dance” loops endlessly through my consciousness—that remarkably persistent earworm from 1983 declaring, “We can dance if we want to,” one contemplates the curious choreography of our current moment. The irony would be delicious if it weren’t so bitter.

Consider the American CEO, that modern aristocrat, whose compensation has pirouetted upward by 940%. In comparison, their workers perform an entirely different dance (12% in the same time span) that barely keeps pace with inflation’s relentless rhythm.

One might call it a modern version of the medieval court dance, where the nobility twirled in their finery while the peasants provided the rhythm with their labour. The more things change, as they say.

Meanwhile, in Serbia, students are performing their own dance of resistance, staging the largest protests since 1968.
Yet Western media outlets, typically eager to broadcast any hint of democratic stirring, have apparently decided this particular performance doesn’t fit their preferred programming.
The silence is deafening, though the steps are familiar—young people moving to the rhythm of hope and frustration while the world’s attention is directed elsewhere.

And in a twist that would seem heavy-handed if written as fiction, Netanyahu finds himself unable to attend a Holocaust memorial in Poland (wonder why would that be…)The weight of historical memory collides with present-day politics, creating a tableau of ironies that even the most ambitious satirist might hesitate to invent.

“We can dance if we want to, we can leave your friends behind” echoes through it all, a bizarrely apt soundtrack to our moment of selective solidarity and calculated indifference.
The song’s infectious beat continues while wealth inequality performs its own elaborate routine, protest movements rise and fall unreported, and historical commemorations become political choreography.

Perhaps Men Without Hats knew something we didn’t.
Their seemingly simple dance anthem takes on an almost oracular quality when set against our current reality: “And we can act like we come from out of this world, leave the real one far behind.” Indeed, some seem to have taken this suggestion rather too literally.

The dance goes on.

The CEOs waltz with their compensation packages, the Serbian students move to the rhythm of resistance, historical memory performs its complex steps, and somewhere in the background, that infectiously inane melody continues its endless loop – a reminder that even in our most serious moments, absurdity is always waiting for its cue to join the dance.

May harmony find you,

Irena Phaedra

P.S. The next post/column/blog will be about dancing with Bowie and equations of contrition.