dance, commemoration, and remembrance of september 11

Some classmates and I are collecting YouTube videos incorporating dance and the remembrance of 9/11 for a pretty low-key presentation for our Public Memory course. In this first, one, the WAIT Team (Washington AIDS International Teens) choreographed and danced to honor the heroes of 9/11:

In this video (which can’t be embedded), the “9-11-01” dance team dances in the 2006 Showstopper American Dance Championships.

This 10-minute video is a bit more personal, in that it’s a single woman who knew people killed in the attacks. I find it interesting in that it’s her dancing in her living room with a pole, and she interspersed images evocative of the attacks, religion, and patriotism in her video.

Via The Poorhouse, here’s Rizwan Ahmed’s (MC Riz) music video for the “Post 9/11 Blues,” in which he sings, “everyone do the post 9/11 dance.” Ahmed’s take is quite the opposite of the previous three videos; instead of commemorating the dead explicitly, he critiques the ways in which 9/11 was used by Bush, Blaire, and others:

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