About

What is “the Real Dancing Eagle”?

Every time you purchase dancing eagle swag, you feed your inner child a post-game orange slice. At TRDE, game-time means dance-time. It's always game time, btw. It always was.

Maybe you want to gift someone a baby onesie with cute, silly-looking eagles on it. Maybe you want to buy each item in our shop for yourself and let the quirky apparel be all that you wear. Maybe you want to teach your kids to recognize letters and numbers and smirk at the same time. Perhaps you’ve found the right brand. But the Real Dancing Eagle is more than a brand. It is a creative space as primitive and expansive as the universe itself. It is its own dimension.

It was birthed in my childhood doodles, which were mimetic of my father’s penned efforts to entertain me, and took form as an emblem of my affinity for wildlife and storytelling: rapidly self-published on construction paper were the chronicles of the eagle vs. the grizzly bear; the eagle vs. the Komodo dragon; the eagle vs. an army of fire ants. The rudimentarily rendered eagle would face them all. And the eagle was poised for combat, perhaps. But its replication and variation, ultimately, would manifest the steps of a dance.

And while it is an expression of a woefully untrained illustrator, confined to an admittedly childish archetype, the Real Dancing Eagle is also an expression of the desire for all the fighting of the world to be transformed into dancing. It is an expression of the belief that all is dance, and that this divine dance is present at the royal ballet, the most elaborate flash-mob, and in the most modest impromptu dance party.

As the doors to this dimension open wider, there is a flourishing of possibilities: In the shadows above the lips of the Mona Lisa: one million eagles dancing. In the inky black between the stars of the milky way: countless eagles dancing. Instead of the embroidered emblem of polo players, alligators and penguins, on the shirt pockets of pedestrians of the past, present and future: the emblem of eagles dancing. The pattern of the eagles, drawn with wings flapping in their willy-nilly dance, can paint any wall; can over-lay any landscape. Irreducible as red, blue and yellow, some scholars have recognized the pattern of the real dancing eagle, so irreducible and ubiquitous in its potentiality—kind of like plaid—as a new primary color. 

The dimension of the Real Dancing Eagle was born within me, but now I know I am only its steward; its herald, hype man and scribe. For it was a cascade of creative forces that led to that first, immaculate doodle of what appeared to be a chewed up stick figure with wings. Sure, it was my sinews that squeezed the crayon; my eye which guided its virgin form. But already my artistic self was becoming less the individual, and more the instrument; an implement of an unfolding ecosystem of off-beat delight. I have embraced my role, removed from the spotlight, as the invisible arbiter of the Real Dancing Eagle; the nameless descriptor of its dimension.

Could the Real Dancing Eagle leave its tell-tale mark upon the world of fashion? Of children’s literature? Of novelty gifts and street art and textbook page graffiti? Will the universe ever be the same?

The potential for disruption is real.

But alongside the Whitmanian celebration of itself, it is ultimately a celebration of the relationship between all dimensions, and the unity of anything and everything that produces joy. Why do the eagles dance? Why do we dance? Look at the questions dancing around our heads! The Real Dancing Eagle strives to be sincere. And silly. And absurd all at once. A participant in a universe that can kick, ball, change with the best of them. It is a celebration of the potential for that cosmic choreography to become more and more real to us all.

- Kyle Martindale

(Founder & Director of Eagle Operations)