the.com/clogging
Percussion you wear on your feet, beating rhythm into the floor like a drummer with no drums.
means A folk dance style in which dancers strike the floor with hard-soled or wooden shoes to create rhythmic, percussive beats, often performed to lively traditional music.
from The root is 'clog,' a Middle English word originally meaning a lump or block of wood — the same sense that gives us the wooden 'clog' shoe and the verb 'to clog' (to block up with a mass). The dance takes its name from those heavy wooden-soled shoes worn by working people, whose footwork beat out rhythms on stone or wooden floors. The style draws on Northern English, Irish, and other European step-dancing traditions and later took deep root in Appalachian America.
- Origin
- Born from Appalachian mountain communities blending European and African dance
- The shoes
- Metal taps split in two for double the clatter
- Improv roots
- Early cloggers freestyled to fiddle tunes, no choreography
- National status
- Kentucky's official state dance since 1988
- Living tradition
- Competitive clogging teams still tour worldwide today
river thames great stink — london sewage system overflow in 1858 that clogged the thames with human waste
suez canal ever given — container ship wedged diagonally across canal in march 2021, blocking all traffic for 6 days
fat berg whitechapel — 250-ton mass of wet wipes and grease discovered clogging london sewer in 2017