Categories
friends & family in other news

My mom has great taste in videos

On the rare occasion that my mother sends me a forward or a link, you know it’s gonna be good. Check it:

Click through to the “About” to see a rundown of all the dancers/movie clips.  So cool!  And I’ll just be over here buying that song from iTunes.

Categories
exhibitions & performances

Santa arrives in a Boogie-Woogie Choo-Choo Train!

I am so excited to see this video!  Last Thursday we danced at the Georgia Sports Hall of Fame’s “Holidays at the Hall” event alongside our friends David Leathers and Mitzi Matthews.  The ending pose of their swing routine is the coolest!  Daniel and I have both been so busy with work this fall that we have not had many chances to dance.  This event was really lovely and we had a great time.  Joey Stuckey, a great jazz musician, played live (we were just the intermission act, and happy to have the honor) so we also got to meet him. And I would be remiss if I didn’t mention that we met Em Fergusson, Joey’s publicist, whom I just missed knowing when she was a student at Macon State College.  Plus it turns out she is French-Canadian.  Such a small world.  Okay, here comes the video.  Our part starts at around 1:20 with Mitzi and David, then we come in at 3:20.  But you should definitely watch the whole thing.

Categories
behind the curtain in other news Linktastic

Dresses in; dresses out

“Laura,” I hear readers asking, “how can I be more like you?  I’ve already signed up for dance lessons and gotten a rockin’ haircut, but how do I take it to the next level?”

Well, young padawan, for the next 7 days you have a rare opportunity to own a piece of DLDancers history.  I am selling two of my performance/competition dresses on Ye Olde Ebay.  Check ’em out!

It is a truth universally acknowledged that you have to sell the old dresses before buying new ones.  (Circle of life?)  So please take a look and enable my shopping habits as well as your own!

 

Categories
Linktastic

How cool is this?

Video for the band OK Go’s song “Skyscrapers”:

Also, so many good dresses & shoes!

Categories
Linktastic

cha cha cha PENNY cha cha cha PENNY cha cha cha PENNY

I happened to have The Big Bang Theory on TV this evening and caught this scene (embedding disabled, so you’ll have to click through).

Things I love:

  • Sheldon’s takedown of cotillion.
  • And his forced acknowledgement that cotillion training prevents him from saying no to three ladies who want to dance.
  • Amy and Sheldon’s cha-cha, which is so terrible it curves around into being awesome.
  • Penny getting groped by her dance partner–but that has never happened to me and I would not want anyone to think it’s a frequent part of social dancing!
  • The dancers in the background, who probably got the thrill of their lives being recruited onto the show out of the nearest Fred Astaire studio.

Also, I’ve been repeating this article‘s argument for years.  Dancing makes great couples’ therapy!  Maybe not for Sheldon and Amy, though.

Categories
Linktastic

Dudes on the Dancefloor!

Michael Kaiser of the Huffington Post makes a sweet and compelling argument for men’s involvement in dance just in time for WRWR’s coverage of Academy of Dance’s new All Guys Hip-Hop class (that’s the studio where Daniel works! woohoo!).  And really, who wouldn’t want to follow in the dancing footsteps of the late, great Patrick Swayze?  25 years since the premiere of Dirty Dancing and after a quarter-century and countless viewings I will still stop down my entire day to watch if it comes on cable.  Jennifer Grey is so spot-on in her description of Swayze (and Derek Hough for that matter) in her interview.  Has there been a better time since the Astaire/Gene Kelly era for male role models in dance?

Categories
Linktastic

Links are your friends!

Once again I’ve been compiling (for values of “compiling” including “happening across”) lots of good dance stuff online lately:

Are Americans too cool for ballet?  I don’t necessarily buy this article’s conclusion, but I buy its premise: that most young Americans are no longer attracted either to the prospect of self-sacrifice for art or to ballet’s polished elegance, pursued with sincerity and delivered without an ironic wink.  The article leaves out an additional factor that is probably compelling: the average high-achieving young person’s drive to be “well-rounded” (which would militate against serious pursuit of one thing in favor of a just-slightly-less-serious pursuit of everything).  On the other side, our interest in high levels of achievement, including extreme athleticism, would argue for greater interest in ballet, for which see this article.  I thought back to that latter piece when (finally getting around to) watching Ovation’s A Chance to Dance this evening.  At the Salt Lake City auditions for their new company, the Ballet Boyz (oh dear) commented on American dancers’ bent towards, and preparation for, solo dancing as opposed to group work. They say that the millennial generation has grown up constantly being reassured that they are special snowflakes.  In ballet, you might have lots of chances to be a snowflake, but very few to be special.  Are we shortchanging our dancers with an overindividualized focus?

Meanwhile, what’s a dancer to do once he or she–how can I put this–moves gracefully beyond the first blush of youth?  My heart was in my throat when I clicked on Dance Magazine’s article about a “decade-by-decade approach to dancing health.”  If they had stopped at the 30s I might have had to throw my laptop out a window, or at least go find Ms. Madison’s copy of the magazine and throw THAT out a window (I like my laptop).  Huge props to them for featuring a 66-year-old who performs in a company and takes class 5 to 6 days a week.  She and Miss Vernetta, whose studio celebrated its 50th anniversary this past weekend, are fierce beasts!

And finally: long suspected by many, now proven by science.  HOWEVER, no one had better lay any “I just don’t have the dance gene” excuses on me or Daniel.  Nurture definitely trumps nature and good training will fix those missing genes right up.  I’ve said it on the Internet, so it must be true. ;-)

Categories
in other news Uncategorized

What I Did on my Summer Vacation

Greetings from DLDancers HQ where I have returned after 5 weeks in Columbia, Missouri at the National Endowment for the Humanities summer seminar “Jane Austen and her Contemporaries.” I went expecting a dance-free summer: I did not even take any dance shoes or dance clothes, planning to focus on fitness and conditioning (read “go running and do crunches”) instead. But it turns out that there’s no escaping the dance world! One of the seminar participants, Cheryl Wilson, is the author of Literature and Dance in Nineteenth-Century Britain and is an expert on English country dancing–the kind of social dancing that preceded partner dancing as we know it today and that is featured in any remotely accurate Jane Austen adaptation. She regularly teaches dances to her students and at conferences. Of course, once we found that out, only one course of action was possible.  I don’t think Srs Hystoricall Dancerz have anything to worry about from our group, but we had SO much fun! Makes me want to start going to JASNA conferences just for the dancing!



Categories
Uncategorized

MSDE 2012 Recital: “Ballet, Boogie, & Broadway”

Well, dear readers, I’ve been thinking about it for almost a week and I’ve come to the conclusion that a recital is not as exciting to recap as a competition or the Dancing Stars show.  Maybe because nobody wins anything?  You show up with all your stuff, you warm up and get dressed, you dance, you change outfits, you dance some more, there’s a huge curtain call at the end, and then the little kids head home and go to bed, the high school girls repair to LaBerry, and the over-30s indulge in one of the perks of age and have a much-deserved adult beverage.  Hey, maybe it’s more correct to say that EVERYBODY wins.  The recital was an excellent show–lots of good dancing and everyone on both sides of the stage had a good time.  I got through my part in La Fille Mal Gardée without disaster and even managed 99% of the pointe work.  Our modern number went extremely well although I’m not entirely sure the audience knew what to make of it.  All the graduating seniors danced splendidly in their solos.  Daniel and his substitute partner Kathryn killed it with their disco routine, and he and I danced pretty well in our rumba.  I’ll never know why I got a giant charley horse in my calf during the rumba but I survived it without breaking stride.  The show must go on, etc.  All in all, success!

Who’s ready for  photos and video?  Click through . . . 

Categories
Dancing Stars of Central Georgia

Come to the dark side . . . we have cookies!

Terrell Sandefur–social media guru, gallery owner, blogger, man about town and now salsa dancer–wrote this lovely post about his Dancing Stars experience.  It’s fun to read about that rollercoaster ride from somebody on the “stars” side.  We were all beginners once; everything that is now familiar and routine was once strange and uncomfortable (especially those Latin shoes!).  It’s great to know that Terrell plans to keep dancing.  If I had my way, these events would be gateway drugs for all the “stars,” every year.

Recital recap, photos, and video to follow later today.  The show was fantastic!  Lots of energy and so many great performances.