I enjoyed all the messages in reply to "What if you hadn't discovered dance"
In the same theme but I guess it's going to be more contentious.
What if the Ceroc the company had never existed?
How would this have changed your life?
What do you think the MJ world and off shoots would be like now?
Spiky
Its finally happen we have run out of things to discussOriginally Posted by Spiky Steve
Hows this going to be contentious ??
Ill give it a go
If ceroc never existed Gus . Rocky Smurf and Andy Mc Gregor would be arguing over something else ?? but what ? I feel another thread is required on that one
I get you !
Id be a fat bald ba****** if ceroc hadnt been inventedno exercise
well you'd be fat anyway
and the diffence is
love ya! S38
Brilliant point. It is a question worth stopping to think about...
So are you saying if there had been no Ceroc the company then there would be no MJ where you are?I get you !
Id be a fat bald ba****** if ceroc hadnt been invented
I'm not even going to try and answer the question as regards the MJ world. As for me....
Chances are: I wouldn't have gotten into dancing.
I wouldn't have met a large number of people who have contributed to huge changes in my life.
I wouldn't be: with the person I'm with, living where I live, doing what I do.
I wouldn't have discovered swing music.
My knees wouldn't hurt as much either, I'm thinking. But that part's worth it.
What's your Point Of Departure?
In other words, you can't just say "What if there was no XYZ", you have to explain why - that's the only realistic way to explore a "What If" scenario like this.
For example, you could say "James Cronin gets run over by a bus in 1979 - what happens then?"
Should the question really be "if the company Ceroc had never existed" or "if someone with marketing skills hadn't decided to promote an easily accessible dance form"?
Surely it's the universality of Ceroc that means that a lot of us had got into it in the first place? If I hadn't started Ceroc, I'd probably have done something else instead - possibly AT as I've been wanting to do it for ages, and I've done other little bits of dance over the years. But there are a lot of people out there who considered themselves to have two left feet and not able to dance at all. It's the accessibility of Ceroc that has got these people dancing, and who might not have done so if it hadn't been around. But it could just as easily have been a different dance form/company.
So, what, if Cronin created Ceroc, but never created Ceroc Enterprises?
Probably be using "Ceroc" or "Leroc" as a generic name for the dance, rather than "Modern Jive". Probably not as many venues around. I'd have probably picked up partner dance via some other group. Might even be a Salsa-dancer. Ick.
Yes that's exactly what I am asking?
Then, there's probably no "Modern Jive", although possibly Christine Keeble, Michel Ange Lau or someone may have created a similar dance separately.
It depends on whether you think something MJ-like was inevitable (given the attractions of a very simple partner dance to the partner-danced-starved UK), or not.
Personally, I don't think it was inevitable - unlike almost every other dance form, MJ can be traced back to pretty much one person as the originating force. No one person originated salsa, AT, or other dance forms.
So, absent Mr Cronin, I suspect that the slack (demand for partner dancing) would have been taken up by other dance forms - most obviously, salsa, but who knows, maybe ballroom would have reserged in the early 1980s otherwise with the New Romantics...
Let's concentrate on London.
Until well into the nineties, there was non-Ceroc MJ four Fridays a month at Notre Dame Hall off Leicester Square, LeRoc Nationwide every Monday at Battersea Arts Centre, Tony's Lune Roc (Roc-la) classes in West Hampstead every Sunday evening, plenty of weekly LeRoc and Cosmopolitan Jive and JiveTime in the suburbs, and the monthly Jive Party.
(And, I think, Christine Keeble weekly at Tottenham Court Road.)
Ceroc had a virtual monopoly in Central London (Tottenham Court Road, Victoria, and Fulham Broadway), Monday to Thursday, and a monthly Sunday tea-dance in South Kensington.
Ceroc didn't try to move into Fridays, or into the suburbs, until later.
James Cronin didn't invent MJ. It started at the Charles Péguy Institute, was developed by Lau etc, and then branched into Ceroc and the others.
If Ceroc hadn't existed, the other MJ organisations would simply have expanded into Central London.
(Oh, and what about the effect of Mike Ellard? If it wasn't for him, there would have been no Sunday tea-dances, no Friday Casbah (first at the Welsh Club, then Turnmills, now Baden Powell House), and no Cricklewood.)
Alternatively, suppose Ceroc had existed (with Tottenham Court Road, Victoria, and Fulham Broadway, and the tea-dance), but no-one had turned it into a business franchise?
Was the motivation of the franchise "pyramid" important to the speed or extent of the MJ expansion throughout the UK? Or would missionaries have spread the good word anyway?
Yay!
Interesting - yes, looking around it appears Michel Ange Lau would indeed have likely developed something MJ-like by himself anyway, that seems to be the direction he was heading in in terms of dance in the late 1970's.
But he was a choreographer primarily, so it's debatable whether he'd have actually created and promoted a brand the way Cronin did.
Although, most likely, the dance style he created would have been "better" than the one that we have now, there might only be 50 people in the country doing it...
Don’t know about that
If there had been no ceroc in Guliford 12 years ago I wouldn’t have met a certain lady and miss out on some great s**
However I wouldn’t have met another lady at ceroc Hammersmith a few years later and ended up marrying the Psyco
So swings and round abouts
Re: Ceroc-the-dance?
Two possible differences between Leroc etc and Ceroc occur to me …
1. I'm just guessing here … I know Michel Ange Lau was keen on footwork and on having Le Roc "recognised" by official dance organisations … so does that mean that his first classes were courses, which you were expected to do in sequence, not missing any out, unlike James Cronin's, which from the beginning welcomed beginners at any class?
2. Every Le Roc or Cosmopolitan Jive or Lune Roc beginners' class I have been to started with the First Move (does that still happen?), while only about one Ceroc beginners' class in four has ever even included it.
I suspect that most dance forms originated with just a small group of people, probably with one or two being prominent. Obviously they had to pretty quickly build a following or they would not have thrived, and pretty soon who contributed what got lost in the fog. The problem tracing dance back is that dancers tend to do it, not write about it.
I no longer tell Ceroc where they are getting it wrong. If I was I'd be talking about people being on the correct foot - or at least knowing which foot they should be on if Ceroc hadn't over-simplified the already simple.
But, as I'm no longer giving my advice for free, I have nothing to say...
.. I just thought people should know
Well, thanks for telling us.I just thought people should know
Because otherwise we'd be completely in the dark about what you are and aren;'t doing.
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