The prime example of a contagious dance from the Roaring Twenties that played a significant role in the emergence of youth culture is the Charleston. The Charleston dance craze was a phenomenon that sent young people into boundless euphoria and older generations into fear and terror. We are showing two short films and a feature film that deal with the Charleston craze in a humorous way.

In ‘Fatal Footsteps’, comedian Charley Bowers plays, as he almost always does, a young man with a monomania, this time his determination to win a dance competition. He practises obsessively, drawing elaborate dance diagrams on the floor, but his style looks less like Charleston and more like a St Vitus' dance. Sur un air de Charleston by French director Jean Renoir is a surreal, erotic satire in which the world is turned upside down and a local white girl in run-down Paris teaches a futuristic African ethnologist how to dance the Charleston.

The two short films are set to music by Argentine singer and dancer Constanza Pellicci and American singer and multi-instrumentalist Steve Buchanan, using an instrument developed by Buchanan that allows music and dance to interact, combining rhythms live while tap dancing to the samples in real time. The body is used as a sequencer, interacting and adapting the beat to the sample tracks. The result is an extraordinary experience between movement and sound that effortlessly transcends the boundaries between music and dance itself.