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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?

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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. ;-)

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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!