YouTube censors Antony and Johnsons, isn’t that silly

Yesterday I wrote about a cool new group and their video Epilepsy is Dancing. When I checked my stories at 4:30 PM, my computer locked up. Apparently, YouTube had taken the video down “because it is supposedly indecent!” Although stunning and provocative, the video is hardly indecent, more of cross between Midsummer Night’s Dream meets Debussy’s painter. There is quite a bit of indecent material on YouTube and this video is art not indecent. What is startling is the combination of disability and sexuality, one of the taboos yet in our society.

The video is so well done, with the lyrics, music, dancing and cinematography I recommend it for viewing by adults and children, pre-teens and older, to teach them about epilepsy. It will allay fears about disability and help us to understand another state of human existence. Most children have already seen more sexuality on daytime soaps and rock videos. Of course, nothing is more immoral and disrespectful to life than the brutal violence shown in movies and TV.

Here is the video on PitchFork TV.

The video depicts a woman walking down an alley then having an epileptic seizure after seeing a deer. Obviously the deer is an hallucination and suggested to be part of her seizure.

Her seizure and the poetic lyrics are startling. We have an idea that seizures are a state of madness, scary and to be avoided. What if a seizure is just a state of mind? If someone is drunk, or high on drugs are their repulsive? Not generally unless they get sick :). Why is an epileptic seizure scary to most people? Why are they uncomfortable?

The song starts,

Epilepsy is dancing
She’s the Christ now departing
And I’m finding my rhythm
As I twist in the snow

In my late teens I roomed with an epileptic and three years ago one of my tenants was epileptic. It wasn’t weird. It was just a thing. A diabetic can go into insulin shock. Is that weird? No, it’s just a state of life. You try to help them out. Epileptics are not mad, they just get seizures. Let’s stop treating like they’re different and dangerous. They are just like anyone. Back to the video.

The scene changes to inside her head where she imagines herself dancing. The scene is highly colored, like “What Dream May Come” when Robin Williams enters the land of the dead to find his deceased wife. Or those commercials on TV about Newfoundland with their saturated greens and blues.

The dancers are painted in bright colors, nude from the waste up and the men have antlers in some cases which ties the mis`e en scene with the dances in Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream or Debussy’s “Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun”. Both of those works of art were considered scandalous 100’s of years later.

The dance ends, the deer/dancer touches her hand as the scene shifts from inside to outside her head. She wakes from her seizure on the pavement. The actress for the epileptic woman is cast as a normal person, not some beautiful young woman, which adds to the realism. The video is an excellent piece of art and censoring it is plain stupid and discriminates against those living with disabilities.