Video for the band OK Go’s song “Skyscrapers”:
Also, so many good dresses & shoes!
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Author: lauraet
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.
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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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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. ;-)
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!
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 . . .
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.
MSDE’s annual recital, “Ballet, Boogie, & Broadway,” kicks off in just under 5 hours. We had an excellent dress rehearsal last night, I got to leave my costumes on the premises so I don’t have to carry them over there again today, I have all the correct shoes in my bag, and (hopefully) the things I wore and then washed last night are dry now. Daniel’s stuff is packed and ready to go and the video camera is charging. Here is what I learned at dress rehearsal:
- It’s great to NOT be in 12 different numbers (as one of my young fellow dancers is) because that’s exhausting and you sweat a lot. But being in only 3, widely spaced apart, as I am, is slightly too few. You get all cold and stiff in between. I’m going to feel silly carrying in legwarmers and a shrug when it’s 90 degrees out, but I’ll be doing it and wearing them anyway!
- If you have my haircut (razor-cut pixie, no 2 strands the same length) and have to slick it back to look like a ballerina, the secret is to wet it and then slather on gel like there’s no tomorrow. When your ballet number is over and you have to unslick to look like a modern or ballroom dancer, re-wet it from another dancer’s spray bottle (bless you, E. J.) and rearrange with a comb. Be prepared for Horror Hair when you brush it all out later. Shampoo twice the next morning (buy one of these in advance to use when it’s all over).
- Draw your eyeliner wings on carefully lest your husband/dance partner point out to you–after it’s too late, of course–that they are incongruent.
- Something’s wrong when you regret things that haven’t happened yet.
- If you are planning to wear a wig, bring it with you!
- There’s no crying at recital. Mostly.
- He may not agree, but it was worth it for our Widow Simone to shave his goatee.
- The big kids are so talented, the little kids are so adorable, and we’re just lucky to be up there with ’em.
Recap/photos/video coming soon!
Since working on Dancing Stars I’ve started to notice something interesting about the way “regular people” (non-dancers or non-habitual dancers) react to being in a dance studio space. For as long as I can remember, I have regarded a dance studio as one tiny step–at most–below a sacred space. In fact, in the Afro-Haitian dance classes I took in college we actually had a little ritual to do with a bowl of water when entering and leaving the studio. But until just recently I thought I was the only one who slightly fetishized the studio experience: all that open space, all that potential, all that blankness somehow serving as a frame for the concentration and repetition and work and progress of dance.
Then I noticed that Daniel’s partner Kathryn (substituting in recital for Ashley, who is on injured reserve) stuck around for an extra 20 minutes or so after she was finished rehearsing. She didn’t really need to be there; in fact, she had a date with her husband. But she stayed to watch us run through La Fille Mal Gardée. And then I remembered the time when Jack just randomly started doing cartwheels in the studio. He said that ever since the first time he’d been there, he had wanted to do cartwheels.
Dance studios are special. It’s pretty cool.
ETA: What if there are no non-dancers? Just former dancers, dancers, and future dancers?
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Good Stuff
Guys, there has been so much good dance stuff online lately that I can hardly believe it. Hat tips to Joyce Newman, Carson Flournoy, Sheri Leblanc, and Arthur Murray of Danvers, Mass. (seven convenient locations)!
This tongue-in-cheek yet totally true and hilarious appeal to men: Dance–The Man’s Choice (from Arthur Murray of Silicon Valley)
Tango Evolution Radio, a casualty of some lost bookmarks, now happily rediscovered.
Sheri’s Dance pinboard and, purely in the interest of full disclosure, my Dance pinboard.
On our best days we are maybe half as glamorous as Iveta & Gherman (behind-the-scenes video of their Dancebeatworld photo shoot).
Saving the best for last: from Ontario Arts Council (yaaaay Canada), “Why I dance”