Michael Jackson as a dance guru – why not?

Who would have thought twenty-three years after shooting to number one on Billboard’s Hot One Hundred, Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” is, one again, as hot as pancakes after being used as background music for the world famous (even gaining space as a featured article in the International Herald Tribune) dance video of the inmates of the Cebu Provincial Detention and Rehabilitation Center!

The footage is, in fact, one of the dozen or so in the repertoire showcasing the terpsichorean skills of the prisoners (seventy percent of whom were convicted for serious crimes like murder, rape and drug trafficking) who practice at least four hours a day!

Pepe Diokno, a student from UP, making the film, “Dancing for Discipline,” said the Cebu inmates have the biggest smiles amongst all the prisoners he had documented for his short film.

Golly, no wonder Socrates practiced music while in prison! His protégé, Plato, even said, “Philosophy is the highest music.”? Studies even going as far back as the ancient wise Greeks show that “all forms of sickness, be it mental or physical, are musical problems”.? Even psychologists have noted that mentally disturbed patients have spent quiet nights under the powerful strains of recorded music (R. Nidamboor).

In this case, music and dance were incorporated to bring about? a change in the prisoners’ daily exercise routine.? The man in charge of it all, security consultant Byron Garcia, was hired to tackle problems confronting Cebu’s prison system.

It doesn’t hurt either that his sister, the Honorable Gwendolyn Garcia, is presently Cebu’s esteemed Governor.? So successful was his experiment that the YouTube video footage has been uploaded more than ten million times and has put Garcia’s modern exercise regime on the shortlist for the 2007 Gawad Galing Pook award for local governance in the Philippines.

Diokno even concludes, “…they aren’t useless scum of society” (referring to the inmates).? “This is rehabilitation already.” by. Ana V. Baliao

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