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.

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.^[8] Yet according to Marcia Griffiths, the song 'Electric Boogie' was written for her by Bunny Wailer in early 1980s.^[9]