Orlando Dance Macabre

a precursor to the infamous Dancing Nurses of 2020

Strange and singular as the “dancing nurse op” (referred to in a previous article) appeared, it turns out it that it was not without (relatively recent) precedent.

In June of 2016, during the aftermath of an alleged terrorist attack on the gay nightclub called Pulse, in which 49 people were said to have perished, the Orlando Police Department bizarrely chose to respond to this ostensible instance of mass murder by recording a video featuring cops and law-enforcement staffers… dancing.

#KeepDancingOrlando - OCSO - YouTube

These video images are “cringe” enough. But when one looks a bit deeper, one discovers that this flurry of “dancing worker” videos was in fact far more widespread than initially thought. In fact, it wasn’t just area cops who were recording these embarrassing segments, which mostly feature out-of-shape, middle-aged paper-pushing bureaucrats bopping about awkwardly with bemused smiles fastened to their fat, wrinkled faces as Whitney Houston’s “I Wanna Dance With Somebody” plays over the soundtrack.

In fact, far more than the Orlando police department were involved in this operation. A whole host of other Orlando-area organizations, both public and private, from hospitals to universities to businesses of various types, dutifully posted identical videos of “dancing employees” in the immediate aftermath of the “Pulse” event.

These videos, whose infamy is preserved on YouTube under the hashtag #keepdancingorlando, all feature nearly identical content; namely, ordinary-looking men and women cavorting with a high degree of self-consciousness, in their places of work. Sometimes they carry signs bedecked with that ubiquitous rainbow emblem, featuring the slogan “Orlando Strong.”

Following are just a few samples. Warning: you are about to witness Chernobyl-level cringe:

UCF College of Medicine - Keep Dancing Orlando - YouTube

#KeepDancingOrlando - Macy's North Florida - YouTube

The Orange County Library System says Keep Dancing Orlando - YouTube

Seen enough? Do your eyes require an exorcism?

If the viewer may at first derive a kind of amusement from watching people of all races, shapes, and sizes moving around, with wildly varying degrees of rhythmic acuity, to a mediocre song three decades old, the charm wears off quickly. One begins to ask oneself: if what happened at “Pulse” is truly the horrific event it was claimed to have been, then how is this an appropriate response?

In fact, there is a certain grotesquery in the sheer relentless contrivedness of the videos. The vast majority of dancing people clearly are participating under duress. Most are trying to make the best of it, but the sickly smiles they flash indicate that they would rather NOT be dancing. They are, in short, being “good sports” about the whole thing. It is beyond “cringe” to watch them; it is painful.

What on earth provoked this strange ad campaign? The closest answer one can find is contained in a brief article, published at Huffpost:

'Keep Dancing Orlando' Is The Beautiful Tribute City Needs Right Now

The viral video will make you smile and cry.

Elyse Wanshel

Jun 23, 2016, 05:52 PM EDT

Dance is helping Orlando heal.

A video that honors and celebrates the lives the 49 victims killed during the mass shooting at Pulse nightclub has gone viral.

The group Keep Dancing Orlando posted a video featuring people busting moves all over city — from Disney World to the beloved, local sandwich joint Beefy King — on Facebook on Wednesday, and it has already garnered more than 36,000 shares and 770,000 views.

The video — which features people dancing to Whitney Houston’s upbeat anthem “I Wanna Dance With Somebody” — encourages viewers to donate to the OneOrlando Fund, and make their own videos of themselves dancing. Once their sweet moves have been recorded, they are then asked to upload the video to social media with the tag #KeepDancingOrlando.

Some people have already uploaded their videos, like local Orlando news station WESH 2 employees and the Orlando Psycho City Derby Girls:

“Forty-nine beautiful souls were taken at Pulse, but their spirit dances on in all of us,” reads the campaign’s site, adding: “We will recover. We will grow stronger. We will keep dancing.”

The article dutifully informs us how we properly ought to feel about this campaign: e.g., it is “beautiful” (really?); it is “helping people heal” (how?); it is “what Orlando needs” (why?); it will make people “stronger,” (really?) and so forth. Such dubious assertions are made without any accompanying explanation. No consideration is given to those who would observe that videotaping a bunch of people dancing around just after an alleged massacre at a nightclub could be construed as wildly inappropriate, even disrespectful to the dead.

What was really the impetus for “Keep Dancing Orlando”? Could the originators of this campaign truly be as ridiculously tone deaf as they seem? Or was the actual motivation for the recording of these freakishly ill-advised videos something entirely unrelated to the reported “Pulse” tragedy, and in some manner connected to the equally grotesque “dancing nurse” videos which would follow four years later?