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| Tck original: Cyril Blanc's brand of Tecktonik dance is spreading throughout Europe. Robert Marquand |
Tecktonik: It's techno with a Parisian twist – a lot of really crazy twists
In clubs, street corners, and online, young Europeans are turning a dance into a subculture with its own mix of fashion, symbolism, and moves.
from the January 29, 2008 edition
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Fatih, of slight frame and large bespectacled eyes, is joined by his girlfriend, and says he's been dancing Tck at Metro every Saturday for two years. It's a dance for his time and generation, he says. "You go out there and forget about your problems and you are moving in a way that gets the negativity out of your system. You feel free and the Tck scene doesn't rely on drugs or alcohol to achieve this."
Cyril Blanc, Tck's founder, says Tck stresses dance athletics. "We don't focus on alcohol. The clientele for Tck are more 'energy drink people,' " he says. "We don't like a scene that starts with booze and gets increasingly rowdy."
In this sense, Tck seems to reflect and draw more from a "good times" middle-class and blue-collar youth culture in European suburbs. The phenomenon is so new that very few social commentators, of which France has many, have caught up with it.
One who has is Guillaume Erner, who writes on the sociology of fashion. Tck "is a very festive, joyful movement … young, mostly 16 to 20, and very ethnically mixed," he says. "The kids are nice, easy to talk to. They aren't like the fashionistas, who are often hard to deal with and full of themselves.
"[Tck] has risen so quickly and diffused so fast," he continues, "because of the Internet, and this is a first. The Internet has made a mass phenomenon out of something that may have otherwise been marginal."
Sorbonne sociologist Anne Petiau, who has started a study of Tecktonik, says she is not yet sure the Tck numbers will outstrip the "rave movement" of the 1990s, but that it is not fundamentally an alternative youth culture of the kind that "glorifies the dark side."
Rather, it is born of the media age, she says: "The people in Tecktonik were born with the media and Internet culture. They reflect a reality-TV-show world, where anyone can become a star and where existing socially means existing in the media."
Videotaping is integral to Tck culture. After the Scorpio team – all from different suburbs and most going to vocational schools – started dancing in a fountain at Trocadero this month, the bit was posted online. On a plaza in front of the Eiffel Tower, they swarmed to the top of a wall, then drifted into a series of "battles" with one another – pseudo-confrontational and in-your-face, but no one is actually hit or slapped.
Points are scored by the most number of moves that seem provocative without an answering move. The battles are taken seriously for a few moments. Then the dancers jump over one another and again regroup. Everyone shouts and feels good.
Parisians of all ages are alternatively bewildered or dismissive.
"I don't like the gestures or the music," says Mathilde, a young soft-spoken Parisian, who is nonetheless in a crowd watching the young dancers.
"I dance all the time," says Diablo-tek, aka Olivier, the leader of Scorpio. "I dance between classes at school, sometimes just with my cellphone [on music setting]."
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