FOOTLOOSE AND PARTNER FREE : When It Comes to Dancing, Today’s Teens Are Single-Minded in Their Devotion

It’s pushing 10:30 as Tiana Alejandro steps out from the shadows, ready to shine.

For the past 30 minutes, the pulsating sound of funk and rap music has throbbed around her, amplified and synthesized, sounding like 50 boom boxes gone amok. Seated on the sidelines at the Zzapp nightclub in Anaheim, Tiana, 17, has been swaying to the music. Getting the feel. Waiting for the right song.

This, after all, is what she has practiced for. This is why she wore the clothes--the kind that look like they may have been bought at some chichi Melrose Avenue store in Los Angeles.

And now, with the deejay cranking up Public Enemy’s “Power to the People,” the moment has arrived.

The beat kicks in, and Tiana grabs a girlfriend and heads for the dance floor.

A girlfriend ?

Is this what the teen-age dance scene has come to?

Yep.

Long considered a necessary step in the primal mating ritual of boy-meets-girl, dancing no longer serves that purpose. These days, if you’re a teen-ager and you want to dance with a member of the opposite sex . . . well, hey, that’s your business.

Today, more than ever before, the music is the partner.

“A long time ago, you had to have a partner to dance with,” said Keith Gaither, 19, the promotions director for Zzapp, a non-alcoholic teen nightclub in Anaheim. “Now, people dance single a lot. People don’t dance with partners anymore. That’s out of style. If you like a girl, you can ask her to dance, but the majority dance by themselves.”

So it was on a recent Friday night at Zzapp, a strobe-lighted cavern where of about 35 dancers on the floor at one point, more than 20 were dancing solo or, at least, without a single partner.

In fact, the dancing was so individualized it looked as if 20 separate auditions were going on at once. Mirrors line the dance floor, and many dancers headed for close-up views of themselves as they took to the floor, rendering an impression of a giant aerobics class.

For those of you who aren’t current with the teenage dance scene, did you also know that:

- Teen dances now are named after movies?

- Today’s dances probably require more physical talent than those of previous generations?

Dancing, even at the high school level, has become “very glamorous” and high-tech, said Gary Salisbury, a deejay at Studio K, a teen dance club at Knott’s Berry Farm. “It’s not a sloppy-looking image anymore.”

The most popular dances at this moment in world history are, in no particular order, the Roger Rabbit, Robocop, the Freddy Krueger (named after the monster in the cinema “Nightmare on Elm Street” series) and the Hip-Hop. Others are the Cabbage Patch, Running Man and, in some circles, Vogueing or Posing. In that one, dancers strike poses while dancing, as if posing for Vogue magazine.

Followers of today’s music scene question whether rock music will ever accommodate couple dancing again. “It all started with the Twist, with Chubby Checker, and they (dance partners) separated,” Salisbury said. “I don’t see it ever getting back to touching anymore. With the sophisticated sound system and CDs and heavy bass beat, it’s just so different nowadays than it used to be. It’s been at a high point for the last four or five years. Power 106 is the No. 1 station in the L.A. market and it’s almost exclusively dance music.”

In one area of the dance floor at Zzapp, six girls danced among themselves. In another part of the room, five teen-age boys worked on their moves. After a couple of songs, two girls took a break and left their friends to continue dancing. Meanwhile, a boy danced across the floor and leaned against a post while his friends kept working on their moves, sometimes dancing but at other times merely milling around on the dance floor. The club also has two elevated dance platforms as well as a small bandstand where the club’s dancers can strut their stuff.

Tiana, who lives in Garden Grove, takes her dancing seriously.

“I have to practice,” she said. “I watch music videos and I tape them. I watch the videos and try to copy the person and put in my own moves. Then I go to the club and watch the people there. At some clubs, you can wing it. At Zzapp, you have to know how to dance. People go to Zzapp and they have their little troupes and have their own little routines.”

Tiana’s first dance at Zzapp was with her girlfriend, Aimee, but she later danced with boys. “I started going to clubs when I was 14, and at first it was a boy-girl thing,” Tiana said. “But as I got older, it wasn’t about dancing with boys--it was like I was dancing with myself. When you go to a club now, you don’t go to dance with a person; you just go there to dance.”

Rob Rader, 18, also dances at Zzapp. He spent much of his night dancing in a group with other teen-age boys. “Guys can go out and start dancing and work on their moves, and the girls can go out and be in their groups,” he said. “I like that. If it’s strictly couples, hardly anybody would dance, because people are sometimes afraid to dance or they’re timid.”

Tiana agreed. “The clubs are still social places, but before, when someone would ask you to dance, you’d automatically think they wanted something from you. Today, you can dance with somebody and be friends and not have any kind of relationship.”

That does not always set off bells and whistles among everyone.

Jeff Santelli, 18, decries dance music more than he decries the dancing. “The dances aren’t a problem for me. There’s a lot of weird dances out there, but the music is the part that really gets to me, because there’s no talent involved in programming a computer” (to help create the sound).

“The music is too fake. It’s not real; everything is synthesized,” said Santelli, who graduated this year from Loara High School in Anaheim. “There’s no talent involved. That’s why I don’t really associate or listen to it.”

Dancing, Santelli said, “is definitely not part of the socializing scene, like it was in the ‘60s. It’s more individual dancing now, not coupling up. A couple won’t dance and then get together afterwards. That’s not how it is anymore. You dance with anyone you can find who’s a good dancer. In the ‘60s, say there was a group like the Rolling Stones. You could go out and dance to them. Even Led Zeppelin, you could dance to. Today, you can only dance to a certain kind of dance music with a certain beat. If it’s heavy metal, you can’t dance to it.”

So, would he be caught dead at Zzapp? “Not a chance,” Santelli said.

Jacquie, a dance instructor at the Londance Studios in Santa Ana, said the current dances require more raw athletic talent than those of 20 or 30 years ago, when rock music spawned a whole new wave of dances. “It takes more rhythm and coordination to do freestyle today than it did the freestyle of yesterday,” she said, defining freestyle as any dance where a couple isn’t in synchronized movement, as in jitterbugging or the cha-cha.

While the bane of bad dancers used to be their feet, nowadays they can’t afford to have anything out of synch. “Feet are important,” said Jacquie, who didn’t want her last name used, “but without the beat in the body, it wouldn’t do much good. You need a whole lot more than your feet. You need to be able to use your thighs, torso, a lot of it is in the shoulders; you see all the arm movement and bouncing around.”

As with many of the dances that became popular in the ‘60s, today’s dance music has sprung from the wellspring of black performers, most notably rap musicians.

“Motown and most of the soul folks were the ones who came up with the real expressive and flagrant movement (in ‘60s dance music), said Dennis Goode, a deejay at the Hop in Fountain Valley, which plays mostly ‘50s and ‘60s music. “The Cool Jerk, the Funky Chicken and the Twist, all seemed to come from soul artists, who always seemed to be the most expressive, not only in lyrics and delivery, but in the way they moved to it as well.”

That link continues today, according to dance instructor Jacquie. “What Motown (the recording company that spawned many of the black singers of the ‘60s) left that still goes on now is a certain kind of funkiness or feeling that goes with that type of music that makes you want to feel the music you’re dancing to.”

She was referring to so-called street dancing, which most people in recent years associated with break dancing and popping--where body movement seemed to progress from joint to joint.

Jacquie believes that street dancing should be recognized as an art form. “During the time of the Swim and the Frug, anyone with half a sense of rhythm could have done that. But the way street dancing has progressed, either you have to have talent or you have to cultivate it.”

Jacquie laughed in considering why many of today’s dances are named after movies. Her only explanation was that the dances typically are originated and named by people in their early teens.

“The Freddy Krueger is done more with the arms and hands,” she said. “I kind of see where they got it, in that it uses the fingers and hands more. In the movie, he reached out and dragged them with those things on his fingers.”

With the Roger Rabbit, a motion simulates taking a big step, as the cartoon Roger did, Jacquie said. She described Robocop as a “robotic type of dance. It’s done with the arms and legs, and you have to synchronize.”

As for the Cabbage Patch? “I’ve yet to find out where that came from,” she said.

Teen-ager fascination with Roger Rabbit and Robocop doesn’t mean the old dances have died, however.

Said Angela Conner, 18, a 1989 graduate of Esperanza High School in Anaheim: “I know more about the dances from the ‘60s, because my mom is really into that and she’s shown me all that stuff, so I’m in kind of a time warp.”

Although she likes current music as well, Angela said, “My mom is into all her ‘60s music she had when she was growing up. She’ll do dances, and I’ll say, ‘What’s that?’ and she’ll say, ‘This is the Swim.’ ”

To old-timers like deejay Goode, who’s 33, today’s dancing doesn’t stack up with that of yesteryear. “To see someone who can still jitterbug like they did in the late ‘40s and early ‘50s, where they really swung their partners, is still a beautiful thing to watch.”