Hypnotic folk dance

Found by @nomatterband and Robert Popper, who notes that one must watch to the very end.

More at Boing Boing

The technology that links taxonomy and Star Trek

Hackers prepare for first "national holiday" in their honor

jeffkart

what? I don’t see it?
Paul Renault

Lemme guess: they’re all on Segways?

/No really, the choreography is amazing.
http://www.bytehead.org/blog/ Bryan “bytehead” Price

At first, it’s “They’re on wheels?”, then at some point, I saw it was obvious that it was roller skates they had on.
hypersomniac

So… uh, where’d you get this acid, man?
jaypee

At 2:44 we see a young Matt Damon taking a break from running the light to give applause.
Eark_the_Bunny

Busby Berkeley would like this.
OgilvyTheAstronomer

tl;dw
http://twitter.com/blindeschildpad Blinde Schildpad

So that’s what female Daleks look like!
Anthrodiva

They weren’t on roller skates. A couple of times you can see the tripping little steps they are taking. What you are seeing is practice.
Glen Able

This was all done with computer graphics. The artists used big skirts because they couldn’t be arsed animating all those legs.
Rich Keller

Wow..!

This reminded me of a couple of very different things – the Spinning chorus from Wagner’s Flying Dutchman and a George Pal Puppettoon.
Chris Burch

Fascinating. I had heard rumors about the Soviets breeding women with wheels for feet.
atimoshenko

I actually saw them live in Doha (of all places) early November. It’s quite a show.
- altert
  
  hehe that’s a coincidence, me too)
http://noctilucent-studios.blogspot.com/ Noctilucent Studios

If hypnotic dance is your thing, then you have GOT to see this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=23HFQcEFYO8
- millie fink
  
  Not bad, but it sucks that Gurdjieff was such a con artist.
  
  I prefer this–skip to :45 . . . (awesome movie overall)
  
  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TCOM_5cC63w
  - bluedream
    
    I think that much of the Gurdjieff dance came from here:
    
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L_Cf-ZxDfZA
viggy

ll I kept thinking, dance of the Daleks
http://twitter.com/the_damned_fool the damned fool

And thus, they generated the electricity required to power their village by the ocean for a month, making all the citizens quite happy.
- bklynchris
  
  On so many levels-what did I just watch? But the ending, had the two mirrors facing each other-level of mental processing. Your interpretation was but one of those reflections flickering through that brain stutter!
  
  I mean, what u wrote literally had me LOL!
lese

One of my cultural regrets is not attending an American Film Institute series on Soviet movies which included one billed as a typical musical telling the “boy meets tractor- boy loses tractor- boy gets tractor in the end” story.
- JontKopeck
  
  Do you or anyone else know the name of this? Replace add the word “movie” after “tractor” and you could be reading your own story.
- Mitchell Glaser
  
  Have you seen the latest Russian film masterpiece? The emotionally overwhelming “War Tractor” premiered this weekend to thunderous snores.
- http://pulse.yahoo.com/_QZLVTMNIPDVPOGSCTZ5P7GKK6E p!ssirk
  
  This is what happens when you expand beyond the boundary of traditional marriage.
gothicgeek

Now I have motion sickness :(
misterpickle

I am a better person for having seen this. Thanks for posting!
http://twitter.com/yogasuz Suzanne LaForest

I am confused. They looked like they were on a backdrop but then they turn and bow to the ocean. What happened to the stage?
Geoduck

I’ve read that one of Terry Nation’s inspirations for the Daleks was in fact seeing a group of dancers very much like this.
http://pulse.yahoo.com/_QZLVTMNIPDVPOGSCTZ5P7GKK6E p!ssirk

With the admonition to watch to the very end came the expectation that they’d be eaten by frogs.
Terry di Paolo

This is Nadia Nadezhdin’s ensemble Birch founded in 1948. And they aren’t on wheels – they have their dresses hemmed right to the floor so you can’t see their feet movements, but it’s a ballet technique that keeps their shoulders virtually still while they move. It’s amazing. There are more of them on youtube…
http://twitter.com/DonCarlitos Charlie McHenry

Ah, Georgian folk dance. Mesmerizing indeed. If you enjoyed this clip, you might also enjoy http://youtu.be/UNXAZcKCY0M
Ian Whitehouse

I thought the North Koreans invented this sort of stuff but now I see they’re just a recent copy :)
speleothem

This was really charming. My guess is at the end they’re bowing to Mighty River Volga.
Sparrowhawk

In Soviet Russia, dance folks you!
- http://pulse.yahoo.com/_QZLVTMNIPDVPOGSCTZ5P7GKK6E p!ssirk
  
  Ladies and gentlemen, we have a winner.
Konrad Błażejowski

Beyonce is already practicing those moves for her next video…
Cheri Borden

When they sitting and waving their arms around, they’re spinning flax with a hand spindle and distaff. Er, I mean they *would* be, if they actually had a spindle, distaff, and some flax. The spinning movements are eerily exact. Also, I disagree with the wheel theory – I propose that they’ve got iron shoes on, and stagehands with big magnets running about madly under the boards.
rfid4dna

The splices are really distracting..
peterkvt80

My guess it is a part of the celebration for the opening of a hydroelectric plant, which is why they bow to the river bringing power and strength to the mighty Soviet empire.
Katherine Spring

I think this is an excerpt of the 1961 comedy, _Devichya vesna_ (_Springtime on the Volga_), the entirety of which can be found here: http://studymovie.com/drama/1693-devichya-vesna-1960.html . It was shot using Sovscope, a widescreen format with an aspect ratio of 2.35:1. In this excerpt, the director seems to be taking full advantage of that horizontal latitude.
Sam Gus

But of course, cultures other than Beatles and (fake) madona exist. Those liking things hypnotic can go easy with soviet films and focus on their own navels instead. Mirrors can provide some help, too.