Another high-concept academic concert treat last week, just before vacation begins at the college on the hill. Frieda Bettany, a Feminist Studies major with a minor in Bullfinch band-watching, presented “The Other Foot: Dance Dance Epistemology,” in which the scholar strove to provide “the underlying tenets and belief systems of synthesized dance music.”
Half of the show consisted of Bettany reading a thesis paper while a boombox blared behind her. But then she turned off the classroom lights, switched on one of those spinning mirrored balls your parents danced to, then played and sang a whole set of self-penned ironic dance tunes to illustrate her thesis—that dance music is based on a iron-clad pre-set system of tribal beliefs which exaggerate gender stereotypes and impair more refined social relations.
One of the songs simply switched all the gender references. Others were purposefully vague and still others indiscriminate. Bettany knew her field of study, and said straight out that there was a whole other culture of gay and bi songs out there, but that those “semiotic signposts” were not erected at the overwhelmingly hetero-sexually minded dance halls where she did her fieldwork. Indeed, Bettany knew her studies were geographically specific to this area, and that her conclusions would be different even if she had studied clubs in other counties in the same state. She even did a musical riff on that—her entirely credible, intellectually underscored disco love ballad “A Night Like No Other.”

We know what you’re thinking now while shaking your booty beneath a textbook-filled backpack: You don’t need a Masters candidate at a lecture hall to tell you that club dance nights reduce us to embarrassingly base impulses. You can get that knowledge, plus a free drink pass, for $5 at D’ollaire’s any Wednesday or Saturday.
Well, we’ve simplified the thesis, obviously. And we can’t properly convey our surprise and delight at Frieda Bettany’s performance skills, which she’s kept under the proverbial bushel until now. That’s why we’ve petitioned to have her repeat the “lecture” after school break ends. If we can’t get D’ollaires itself, Hamilton’s or the Bullfinch will do.
Bottom line on this booty treatise: Personally, we enjoyed it more than we’ve ever enjoyed hanging around a dance club. We don’t exactly see ourselves in that mirror ball, but we’ve always liked a little self-reflection with our social intercourse, and Frieda Bettany gave it to us.

In conventional clubs: The Germanes, The Naomis and the Glorious Steins at the Bullfinch, Scum Man at Hamilton’s (two sets, more shouting) and nobody worth mentioning at D’ollaire’s… Sign up for a non-militaristic musical competition—that is to say a “Battle of the Bands” without the word “Battle” in the title, and only “peaceful” themes, scheduled for late March at the Community Center….