“So the kids they dance and shake their bones.” Calvin and Hobbes

“Just Start”

Double Dutch is the art form of synchronous movement, steps, rhythm, lyrics, moving with the staccato slap of rope to blacktop.  Before young dark girls on Harlem streets stepped between twirling ropes and whiffled beats, the Dutch Settlers came to New Amsterdam.  Actually what had happened was that the Americans saw the English who saw the Dutch who had heard about it from the Phoenicians who had seen the Egyptians.  Through the passage of time origins become a little sketchy but in the 1970’s a New York City Policy Community Affairs detective, David Walker, and his partner Detective Ulysses Williams, developed the street game into a world class sport.

Double Dutch is an exhibition of attitude, agility, coordination, time and rhyme.  Turners spin and twirl the ropes into a double helix while the jumper waits in the wings next to the twirling Turner.  She feints, dips, and times her entrance into the swirling sideways eddy, her performance space. 

After synchronizing the whip of the beat onto the street to her dancing feet, she hops in from stage right or stage left and her feet romp, skip, and stomp as all for one and one for all chant:

Miss Mary Mack*

As each character in this jump rope song is named, another player joins the jumping. As each character leaves in the song, a jumper stops jumping.

“Miss Mary Mack, Mack, Mack
All dressed in black, black, black
With silver buttons, buttons, buttons
All down her back, back, back.

She asked her mother, mother, mother
For 50 cents, cents, cents

To see the elephants, elephants, elephants
Jump over the fence, fence, fence.

They jumped so high, high, high.
They reached the sky, sky, sky.
They never came back, back, back
Till the 4th of July, ly, ly!

“Cherish Today”