A few years back VICE was the victim of a hoax. In 2015 Blake Butler wrote an article about a psychological phenomena that was penetrating deep into the neural pathways of unwilling participants the world over. There was, he postulated, and understandably had reason to believe, a man who was haunting people’s dreams. Known as “This Man” the figure was born into being by a designer using facial composite software in an attempt to transmute a shared sense of recognition into something tangible. The result was an image that sat somewhere between Andrew Lloyd Webber, that odd little bloke in Twin Peaks and Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, the president of Egypt. Sadly, it turned out that he wasn’t actually zipping from dream to dream, dilly-dallying from one pillow to the next. He was just a big prank. A big funny Situationist prank.
The idea is a seductive one though. After all, we’re told that the human brain can only conjure up faces that its owner has seen with their own eyes, that creating an entirely new face from recollected features is an impossibility. “This Man” plays with that idea, planting the notion that a shared dream, a shared, willed-into-being human being can exist. Who wouldn’t want to believe that?
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I believe it. I believe that there’s proof that a “This Man” is out there. I believe that I am proof of that. Not me personally—I’m not the one waking your partner up at 4AM in a cold sweat, nor am I the person your brother-in-law’s therapist has made concerned notes about—but I know that I and thousands of others out there are visited on a semi-regular basis by the same person. He’s a person we’ve never met. He’s this guy:
Caught here in a vaguely messianic moment, the silhouetted figure above roams around YouTube. “The Dancer,” as I’ve come to know him, is a rambunctious, fun-loving kind of guy, the type of bloke you want on your team as you stroll into some Hackney Wick basement of a Friday. He’d smile at one and all, whack round after round on the Visa debit, effortlessly managing to generate the kind of vibe that’ll see you reminiscing 40 years down the line, ill and emaciated, struggling to sink the last few gulps of your Bombardier in a run-down pub on the outer-reaches of the A58.
The reason that he lightens the dark of my waking life and illuminates my dreams night after night is simple: he just never stops dancing. Ever. If—and the thought of this brings a tingle to my skin, vibrates my mind, body, and soul—he were real, if he were flesh and blood, there would surely be nothing left of him but cauterized stubs. His death, presumably of heart complications or a burst lung, would be a noble one, for he would have danced himself to death. He would have laid his body down for hedonism.
His movement is joy distilled, breakdancing as the ultimate form of self-expression, a whirlwind of windmilling libs. Speed him up and it’s one, long, unbroken swirl, jointless, seamless. Slow him down and you see the joins and stitches and the minute trickery involved in executing dancing in such an apparently effortless manner. He could well be the dancer that Sister Sledge sung about, their Adonis-shaming disco delight.
The Dancer has diverse tastes: you’re as likely to see him busting a move to Blaze’s deep house roller “Lovelee Dae” as you are to Celeda’s chugging “Music is the Answer” or rave-dad favourites like “Voodoo Ray” and “Chime”.
He seems to have been willed into being by a YouTube user called davepeo77, a man as mysterious as The Dancer himself. Together they have created a world in which dancing is the only thing that matters. This is a space in which snap elections and escalating fears of an eventual nuclear war with North Korea quite simply don’t exist, a place where you don’t have to feel bad about not being up to date with Better Call Saul, a world where you need not feel guilty for not having read Proust in French yet.
The dance never changes, but it doesn’t need too—why alter perfection? In the same way we don’t add a filter to Velazquez’s Portrait of Pope Innocent X, or recast Dwayne Johnson in John Hurt’s role in Alien, why should we expect The Dancer to master new routines.
Sometimes in this world, all we really want is stability and permanence—something that tells us that everything will be ok. Baths, spaghetti carbonara, the unceasing dancing of a bloke who looks like he got turned away from the iPod advert auditions: all of these will live on when the dust settles and the cockroaches gnaw away at the offal we’ve become.
