Continue reading »]]>

Last night, thanks to the mysterious appearance of the HBO channels on our cable lineup, I finally watched Black Swan.  I approached the movie with extreme trepidation: because I get creeped out really easily and I don’t like to be startled, several people had told me I shouldn’t see it at all.  But I had Daniel next to me making fake-scary faces, waving his fingers, and going “WOOOO, it’s just a MOOOOOOVIE,” so I went for it.

At the end of the movie I posted on Facebook: “Saw Black Swan finally.  Kind of want to slap Darren Aronofsky upside the head.”

Here’s the thing: I am entirely willing to believe that the world of ballet has the potential to attract and/or create psychologically damaged people.  (It helps that I was obsessed with Gelsey Kirkland’s autobio Dancing on my Grave  when I was in high school.)  Stage mothers living out their frustrated dance dreams through their daughters are real.  Emotionally and sexually manipulative company directors are real (depending on the view one takes of George Balanchine, who by some accounts was the model for the character of Thomas in Black Swan).  The consuming desire for perfection is real.  The anxiety about career longevity and advancement is real.  The bloody toes are real.  Even the characterization of Nina, simultaneously sheltered and damaged, coddled and neglected, rang somewhat true for me: a promising dancer who commits to a company at age 18 is making a decision she probably isn’t developmentally prepared to make and ends up coming of age in a hothouse atmosphere where her usefulness to society is very narrowly defined (see also Sergei what’s-his-name, 21, who just left the Royal Ballet to run a tattoo studio or something).

So my beef with Black Swan is not with its portrayal of the world of professional dance.  My beef with Black Swan is with its cinematic style.  Doesn’t Aronofsky trust his audience?  The beginning of the movie was so in medias res that I actually thought we had missed the first 15 minutes or something.  We have no indication of how Nina became the psychological train wreck that she is (potentially a more interesting story, IMO).  The movie starts with the melodrama-o-meter dialed up to 11 and then keeps cranking on it all the way to the end.  Stop it with the claustrophobic interiors, the grey-on-grey-on-grey color scheme, the relentless distastefulness of the characters.  Couldn’t I just have spent the whole movie with Mila Kunis’s character?  She seemed like a cool girl.

I wasn’t bothered by the creepiness/grossness per se, or the sexuality–I am on record as loving the movie The Libertine, one of the most explicit and nastiest movies I’ve ever seen.  But, again, memo to director: WE GET IT.  Girlfriend needs therapy.  And her own apartment and a normal boyfriend and some friends and maybe a protein shake.  Nor do I mind Natalie Portman having used dance doubles and then kept quiet about it.  High-level ballet training is a 15- or 20-year pursuit requiring that one start with a fairly specific body type.  Hardcore dance nerds would notice that she was using a double (“There’s no way that’s really her”) and we’d have noticed if she hadn’t (“That was terrible; she should have had a double”).  The rest of the world probably wouldn’t care, and the awards that she won were for acting, not for developpés. Keeping the use of doubles a secret till after awards season was a dumb decision but probably an administrative one.

While I’ve got you here, though, I have to say that I don’t understand giving those awards for what I felt was largely a one-note performance.  She spent 80% of the movie crying or trying not to cry.  I don’t believe, come to think of it, that such fragility would have survived in the professional dance world as long as her character supposedly did.  Even if you take into account that she hadn’t had a piece of cake in at least 15 years.

The dance world is an insider’s world. I think that’s the reason that ballet movies are always flawed.  Educating an audience and then creating compelling characters and telling an engaging story is a lot to do successfully in two hours.  I credit Black Swan for its ambition but fault it for being headache-inducingly melodramatic (true fact: I had a headache at the end of the film) and, in the end, unoriginal.  I would venture to suggest that the truisms of ballet that I enumerated above are widely enough known to stand as clichés.  And I would happily watch a movie of much greater subtlety and originality in which an insurgent dancer equipped with good mental health, supportive friends, and actual body fat (just a little) successfully pushed aside the punishing atmosphere and mind games of her company, opening the way to its re-creation as a creative juggernaut of positive energy.

But then, I am a Pollyanna.

Continue reading »]]>

Here, these should keep y’all busy for a few minutes till I have time to write a proper post.

“Hip Hip Chin Chin” became one of my favorite songs because of this:

. . . and now this is popping up on Twitter:

Twitter also says it’s National Ballroom Week.  Around here that is EVERY week.

Continue reading »]]>

NPR’s Scott Simon presented a commentary this morning about a planned meet-up/protest today at the Jefferson Memorial.  Today’s event follows an appeals court ruling in May that upheld the National Park Service’s arrest of a woman and her friends in 2008.  They were arrested for silently dancing at the Jefferson Memorial in celebration of Jefferson’s birthday; the arrest was on the grounds that dancing was at odds with the “atmosphere of solemn commemoration” around the national monuments.  Today’s meet-up invites people to bring earbuds and, again, dance silently.

Scott Simon referenced the movie Footloose in his commentary and called John Lithgow, who played the anti-dancing minister in the movie.  Lithgow commented that the meet-up would be a flash mob: “An almost meditative moment passing as a great party. It may be a spectacle, but that’s an act of creation.”  What a great definition of what dancing is about in general.  Dancing takes the meditation of lessons (formal, informal, whatever) and daily practice (also formal, informal, or whatever) and displays the fruits of that labor in a moment of spectacle.  And that’s not necessarily at odds with solemn commemoration, either.

I understand what the Park Service was trying to do, but I respectfully suggest–as did Mr. Simon, in a different way–that when they arrested the original dancers, they did so out of a limited understanding of dance and what it can communicate.  Dancing can be celebratory; it can be sexual; it can be disruptive.  It can also be respectful, honorary, worshipful, solemn, elegant, and elegiac (and a bunch of other things).  As someone who typically values the life of the mind over the fetishization of the body, I am not always at ease with the overtly sexual and celebratory aspects of dance myself–but that’s got more to do with me than with the nature of dance.  I love the idea that dance can communicate complex messages in complex ways and in unexpected places, and maybe bridge some divides in the process.

The arrest of the original dancers is a stark reminder of how much courage it takes to dance in public in any context: leaving your friends along the gymnasium wall at your junior prom and getting out on the floor, or trying out some moves at a nightclub, or taking a class, or performing for an audience.  Yesterday at dress rehearsal we heard a tiny girl, lining up to go onstage, say to her mother “I’m so scared.”  She wasn’t hysterical; she wasn’t crying; she wasn’t trying to run or throw a tantrum.  She was standing perfectly still and wide-eyed, confronting what she was about to do.  Performing is an amazing high and a huge accomplishment, purchased at the cost of a big personal risk.  What could be more intimate than moving your body in front of an audience, trying to communicate through your movements?  I wouldn’t go so far as to suggest that our dance recital today, or our competitions, or our lessons & classes, are political acts. But I salute everybody who’s willing to take the risk, overcome their fear, and get out there, wherever “out there” may be.  Merde to our dancers and to the crew at the Jefferson Memorial.

Continue reading »]]>

A body that is dancing tends to continue dancing unless acted on by an outside force.  In the absence of outside forces (spring semester ended on May 6;  congratulations, Class of 2011!), we have been dancing a lot and doing a lot of dance-related stuff in the last several days.  Since I haven’t had to teach I’ve been going to four ballet classes a week at Madison Studio: my usual twice-a-week “Pearls” class (average age: 11, focused on beginning pointe work and trying to remember which is croisé and which is effacé) plus two adult classes which, despite being ostensibly for beginners, serve to demonstrate that one can never spend too much time working on the basics.  All this ballet is having several salubrious effects, including finally loosening up the hamstring I pulled a few months ago and keeping me from going insane as I work on revisions to my book manuscript.

We are still working on our paso doble; on Monday we went over the videos we recorded in our last lesson with Eddie and just repeated, repeated, repeated the steps without even trying to get up to tempo.  This video that a friend sent me earlier today demonstrates just how far up “up to tempo” actually is.

No lesson this past weekend, but on Sunday we had an all-studio blocking rehearsal at Madison Studio for the recital on June 4.  Having the entire population of the studio in one place at one time was an impressive exercise!  It was our dancers’ first time doing their recital piece for any kind of audience and they did great.  We also managed to remember our rumba routine despite not having done it for a while.  The real high point was running the “production finale” in which every class appears, one after the other, and dances a short additional routine.  Lots of us are in more than one class, so there was a lot of dashing from one side of the studio to the other, hurried changing of shoes, and general crowd control.  The ballroom dancers also had a good laugh at the “FootUndeez” I wear for the contemporary ballet number I’m dancing in.  Yes, they look like panties for your feet.  Hence the name.  Can we all just move on now?  (Okay, they are pretty funny, especially the ones I’ve seen that have a little pink net tutu ruffle around the elastic part.)

After regular classes on Monday (Pearls class, paso practice with Daniel, ballroom class) and adult class Tuesday at noon, the ballroom group reconvened at the studio on Tuesday evening to get pictures taken.  The marvelous Keiko Guest (check out the “Fine Art” side of her site for sure, but a couple of those may not be SFW) comes to the studio once a year to take individual pictures of everyone in their recital costumes.  She brings along a staff of 3 or 4 people, a small photography-studio setup (lights, background, even one of those fans to make your hair blow around and look glamorous), and more computer equipment than I ever thought possible.  In less than an hour we had lined up to wait, had a jolly time getting our photos taken, and looked at our proofs to order prints.  The pictures were amazingly good and I can’t wait to get the prints.  Ms. Guest is a former dancer herself, so she understands what good lines look like and how to adjust people’s positions so that on film, we look like better dancers than we probably really are!  Daniel and I had a lot of fun coming up with poses for ourselves and then inflicting them on our other two couples.  The best part was taking some shots of all 6 of us together.  She somehow made us all look attractive and dancerly while crammed into about 4 square feet of space on her backdrop.

So it’s been a great couple of weeks, and the beat goes on.  This evening we’re dancing at Pinegate with the performance ensemble from Madison, then on Saturday we have a lesson from Eddie.  And today we got a call from another retirement community here in town, wanting us to schedule a performance.  AND…according to the counter on their website, Gumbo is just 5 days away.  I’m pleased to report that the counter is not accurate!

Continue reading »]]>

Our class is learning the cha-cha–and also learning how hard it can be to do the steps accurately AND up to tempo. (If they’re anything like me, it’s usually one or the other…) Last night I downloaded my favorite slow/practice cha-cha song. Click and enjoy!

In other news, it became known in class last night that I have never seen Saturday Night Fever.  How egregious is this omission for someone who will watch practically any movie with dancing in it*?  I’ve also never seen Dirty Dancing: Havana Nights (whence “Represent Cuba”), but that seems less embarrassing somehow. I have seen Take the Lead, Mad Hot Ballroom, Shall We Dance (both versions), Scent of a Woman, Strictly Ballroom, and numerous ballet movies, good, bad, and indifferent.

Dance-movie suggestions and cult-favorite song choices welcomed in comments.

*Exception: Black Swan, which I am still debating about.

Continue reading »]]>

Last night we danced our new rumba routine at an International Festival event at Mercer University. It was a really nice event: good turnout, nice weather, really sweet organizer (Hi Laurel!). So if I didn’t dance well (spoiler: I didn’t), I can’t seriously blame anyone but myself. Still, on the way home I was consoling/amusing myself by thinking up excuses and pretty soon I decided that what the world needs is a master list of ballroom dancing excuses. This list will attempt to address social, competitive, and exhibition dancing. Feel free to add your own!

• The floor was slippery
• I couldn’t hear the music
• We weren’t warmed up
• Lost earring/eyelash/fingernail/concentration
• It was too early in the morning
• A judge was in our way
• My shoes are too big
• Dehydrated
• I forgot the steps
• My partner forgot the steps
• I never knew any steps in that dance to begin with, a.k.a. “Who entered us in a Polka heat???”
• The floor was sticky
• Not enough hairspray
• Not enough coffee
• Not enough cocktails
• Too many cocktails (moderation is key)
• Handsy partner
• We got an unlucky number
• Other couples were sandbagging
• Still working the kinks out of the new routine
• Wedgie
• Hypoglycemia
• The floor was too small
• I’m not cool enough for West Coast swing
• Or Argentine tango
• The tempo was off
• The photographer blinded me with his flash
• My shoes are too tight
• We missed breakfast
• I only know steps from [insert syllabus here]
• I hate that song

Debating whether I should put asterisks next to the ones that have actually happened to us!

Continue reading »]]>

Internet, I revealed a secret to our dance class tonight, and now I’m going to share it with you.  But it’s a secret, so I’m going to whisper, and then you can’t tell it to anyone else.  Only your fellow dancers can know this.  Lean in close.  Wait, let me get a mint. Okay, now lean in close…
You don’t have to know very many steps to make other people think you’re an amazing dancer.

Sure, if you want to compete or do performances, then you need a bit more variety.  But if you just want to dance socially–weddings, parties, events like that–a few basics will take you a long way.  The key is in the way you do the steps.  If you are standing up straight with a nice big frame and a pleasant look on your face (or, where applicable, a good nasty tango face), you can do the same three steps over and over again and people  will come up to you afterward to say “You are such a great dancer!”  Enjoy your dancing, and other people will enjoy your dancing.  Daniel and I are not the best technicians in the world (yet…hahaha) but people always remark on how much fun we seem to be having.  That’s what it’s all about, after all!

And take it from me: after you get a compliment on your dancing from a stranger, you will never want to miss another lesson.  Mark Twain once said “I could live two months on a good compliment.”  I’m pretty sure he’s not the only one.

Continue reading »]]>

The Georgia Sports Hall of Fame and Music Hall of Fame, both mainstays of tourism and history in downtown Macon for over 10 years, are in danger of closing and moving to other cities. The state of Georgia plans to phase out funding for the halls over the next few years, requiring them to become self-sufficient or to receive funding from other sources.  The Georgia General Assembly is requesting bids from cities on both halls, opening the possibility that one or both will leave Macon and move to another city.  Meanwhile, a group called Halls of Fame, Inc. is bidding to keep both halls in Macon and a petition drive has started at SavetheHalls.com.

As ballroom dancers in Macon, Daniel and I are most familiar with the Georgia Sports Hall of Fame, where USA Dance Greater Macon Chapter #6059 has hosted dances on First Fridays for the last several years.  The first dance event I ever attended in Macon was at the Sports Hall of Fame.  The connection between our chapter and that venue seems to me like an obvious choice for promoting dancesport toward its eventual recognition as an Olympic event, which is one of the goals of USA Dance.  The Sports Hall of Fame has been extremely generous toward our chapter and I hope we can repay that generosity by joining in the effort to keep it and the Music Hall of Fame here in Macon.

We want to keep the Halls of Fame in Macon as part of the city’s overall effort toward growth and renewal.  The presence of the Halls of Fame here gives visitors to Georgia another reason to explore beyond Atlanta, Savannah, or other typical tourist destinations.  It also provides an anchor for the expansion of downtown commerce into tourism and after-hours nightlife.  AND it gives dancers a place to dance.  So…

Save the Halls!