Electric Slide

For the film, see Electric Slide (film).

The Electric (better known as The Electric Slide) is a four wall line dance. Choreographer and dancer Richard L. "Ric" Silver claims to have created the dance in 1976.^[1]

Dance popularity is sometimes attributed to its setting to Marcia Griffiths and Bunny Wailer's song "Electric Boogie", which was written and recorded for the first time in December 1982.^[2][3][4]

There are several variations of the dance. The original choreography has 22 steps,^[5] but variants include the Freeze (16-step), Cowboy Motion (24-step), Cowboy Boogie (24-step), and the Electric Slide 2 (18-step). The 18-step variation became popular in 1989 and for ten years was listed by Linedancer Magazine as the number-one dance in the world.^{[citation needed]}

The original dance was choreographed to be danced in two lines facing each other and in the course the opposite dancers circle each other.^[1]

Controversy

In 2007, Silver filed DMCA-based take-down notices to YouTube users who posted videos of people performing the 18-step dance variation. The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) filed suit on behalf of videographer Kyle Machulis against Silver, asking the court to protect Machulis's free speech rights in recording a few steps of the dance in a documentary video posted to the Internet.^[6] On May 22, 2007, the EFF came to an agreement to settle the lawsuit: the settlement states that Silver will license the Electric Slide under a Creative Commons noncommercial license^[7] and will also post the new license on any of his current or future websites that mention the Electric Slide.

The NPR reporter Patricia Meschino wrote: "Broadway Choreographer Ric Silver created the popular line dance the Electric Slide for the song-a routine Wailer nimbly demonstrates in a 1989 video".^[8]

In recent decades, there has been some controversy regarding the creation year of the Electric Slide line dance. Silver claimed that he received a demo of the song 'Electric Boogie' in 1976, which he used to create his dance steps.^[9] Yet according to Marcia Griffiths, the song 'Electric Boogie' was written for her by Bunny Wailer in early 1980s.^[10]