Soca / Bacchanal (Carnival) Dance

The pelvis rotates continuously and independently over soft knees and a small, grounded footprint, with the spine fluid and the shoulders relatively quiet. Chipping keeps the feet shuffling forward in a low, repeatable gait; jump-and-wave adds vertical jumps with a rag or hand raised overhead.

Ad hoc and negotiated. Wining happens back-to-front, front-to-front or in threes, with partners forming and dissolving in seconds; the local vocabulary for taking, giving, refusing and returning a wine functions as an explicit consent grammar.

Competition sits in the music and the mas rather than in judged dancing: Road March, Soca Monarch and band-of-the-year contests shape what is danced, and fete and stage 'wine' contests appear informally.

Trinidad and Tobago is the source, but Barbados Crop Over, Jamaica Carnival, Antigua, Grenada, Notting Hill in London, Labour Day in Brooklyn and Caribana in Toronto each have their own road etiquette, costume conventions and preferred soca sub-styles.

Wining is not a Caribbean invention of the late twentieth century but part of a long African-derived movement vocabulary, and it is not inherently a sexual proposition; the culture has detailed conventions distinguishing a social wine from an unwanted one. Soca is also not a subgenre of reggae or of dancehall, and Carnival dance is not the same as traditional or folk Caribbean forms.