Category: in other news

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dancing in the media in other news

Who takes the lead?

My Twitter-mate Caitlin Doran posted a link earlier today to this article in Canada’s National Post.  The article reports an incident in which a woman was asked to leave a jive class after trying to switch to the leader’s role and “lead her male partner.”  The instructor contends that the student was asked to leave because “she disrupted the class” and that changing roles would “complicate things” for her fellow dancers.

As presented, this story is confusing to me.  The instructor quoted in the article is not incorrect when she talks about the traditionally gendered roles in ballroom dancing.  As everyone knows, men lead and women follow.  Daniel and I have a lot of riffs on this convention, most of which serve the purpose (I’m pretty sure) of adapting it to our more egalitarian age.  How do we square this highly conventional practice rooted in centuries-old norms with the fact that most of us no longer live by those norms when we’re not on the dance floor? I genuinely believe it’s difficult for independent career women of the 21st century to relinquish control, even on the dance floor.  And although men are the traditional leaders in the ballroom, dancing has been so thoroughly skewered as “effeminate” that most men arrive at the dance studio reluctant and uncertain about being there, much less taking charge.  The instructor may have been correct in saying that everyone should stick to and reinforce those conventional positions, since both learning to follow and learning to lead are special skills that don’t come naturally to many of us these days.

At the same time, it’s good for dancers of both genders to learn both roles at some point.  I’ve been working on and off on learning to lead, and it is HARD.  Not only do I have to do all the steps in reverse, I have to reset my brain to “Plan Ahead” instead of “Wait and Pay Attention” (hey, new “Keep Calm” poster idea: “Keep Calm and Wait for the Lead”).  And Daniel has learned to lead a lot of steps better by having Eddie lead him through them while he does the follower’s/woman’s part.  (Eddie: “Here, see what it feels like to dance with a real woman”).  So I’m more than a little surprised that the instructor made such a big deal out of the matter.  If it were a group class with a diversity of levels and this couple felt like they’d thoroughly mastered their own usual parts, why not switch it up and see what else they could learn?

The article also addresses the traditional heteronormativity of ballroom dancing and the ways in which various organizations and governing bodies deal with that fact–broadly, by either enforcing it or throwing it out the window.  It’s an interesting window into the possible future(s) of our art/sport.

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behind the curtain in other news

How to Buckle Ballroom Shoes

Last night at our dance a young lady asked me how to buckle ballroom shoes.  “I Googled it,” said the young lady, “and I couldn’t find anything!”  She had a pair of shoes that had been sitting in her closet for at least a year, unworn, because she wasn’t sure how to operate the buckle.  A lot of ballroom shoes come with this nifty (but not self-evident) quick-release buckle mechanism.  If you know how to use it, you will become resentful of ballroom shoes with regular buckles.  If you don’t know how to use it, your shoes will languish in neglect and you will be sad.  To address these problems (baffling buckles and their apparent absence from The Google), I have made my first-ever instructional video, How to Buckle Ballroom Shoes.  Its subtitle is “How to Look Washed-Out in a Webcam Video.” Enjoy! And please send blush & eyeliner.

 

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faaaaaaaame! in other news

WE R FAMUS SHAG DNCRS

Say it with me: Not really! But last night Daniel and I went to the Macon Shag Club (motto: “It’s Not What It Sounds Like”) for the first time and were very warmly welcomed.  Shag is a much-loved dance in the Carolinas and the South more generally; we have not yet begun to learn it so we really went just to check out the scene.  One of the club members, Andy, also comes to a lot of other local dance events and was very excited to see us.  He said he couldn’t stand the fact that we weren’t dancing and I had to tell him that we don’t know how to shag at all.  Half-seriously I said “If you can get the DJ to play a tango, we’ll dance to it.”  I thought he’d demur because the tango is about as far from the shag as you can get, but he led me up to the DJ, introduced us, and had me pick out a tango from the DJ’s song list.  And that’s how we ended up doing an impromptu tango demonstration at Jock & Jill’s sports bar, being videoed by the club’s leader, and appearing on the Macon Shag Club’s page on Facebook.  Do we get extra glamour points for my socks and Daniel’s Wake Forest t-shirt?

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behind the curtain Dancing Stars of Central Georgia in other news

One month till showtime

Well, sports fans, it’s spring break at the Madison Studio and my parents are in town this week (Hi, Mom & Dad! See you again in June!), so not much dancing going on here at DLDancers HQ.  Nevertheless, because I am just that kind of hard-working bloggiste, I am bringing you some updates.  With Dancing Stars of Central Georgia just under a month away, preparations are going forward even when rehearsals are not.

First, can I show you Jack’s and my Dancing Stars rehearsal video?

. . . Also starring my Lauren-Bacall-style laryngitis voice.  Until I saw it, I’d forgotten that I was sick the day they recorded it.  The show must go on!

On Wednesday we had a production meeting for Dancing Stars at the show venue, Macon’s City Auditorium.  The City Auditorium is the same lovely neoclassical edifice that hosts the Cherry Blossom Gala each year.  We dancers found out that if we sell it out, we’ll have an audience of about 700.  Glory hounds that we are, we immediately set our sights on a sellout–if we can pull it off we’ll be the first Dancing Stars show to sell out the first year’s event.  This is the part where you go visit Jack’s page on the site and buy your ticket.  It’s okay, I’ll wait.

I took some pics at the City Auditorium during the production meeting:

The organizers are still working on getting the stage floor in dance-worthy condition but I’m sure it will be perfect on May 12.  The more Daniel and I see of the stars and pros in action, the more we realize this is going to be an incredibly exciting show.  Click through from Jack’s video and watch some of the other couples: Karla Redding-Andrews, Portia Lake, Mary Perdue, Steve Welsh, Jim Elliot, Elbert McQueen, Terrell Sandefur, Courtney Swift.  Everyone is pulling out these dynamic, high-level, polished routines.  I can’t wait to see them all on the stage!

I also did the only thing a dancer really can do on days off: stretching & flexibility cardio strength training buying shoes.  Got a new pair of pointe shoes, which are still waiting to be sewn (see 1:50) and my shoes for Dancing Stars which are these.  They look amazing.  Now I am just waiting for my dress to arrive. *taps nails*

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behind the curtain in other news

How the other half lives

Dear readers, I have a secret.

I am not a professional dancer.

In fact, because of USA Dance’s rules about amateur competitions, I am explicitly, stridently, and vocally Not A Professional Dancer. But lately I’ve been impersonating one for a couple of days each week and here’s what I’ve learned: being a professional dancer is HARD.

Today I got to the studio at 2:15 and left early, i.e., about 7:15.  That’s an hour and a half of tango rehearsal with Jack, a 45-minute break, an hour of modern, and what would have been an hour and a half of ballet if I’d stayed till the end.  Same thing last Tuesday.  Same thing on Thursday minus the modern class.  It’s awesome, but boy,  I can tell I’ve been working.  Real pros are my new personal heroes.  I’m having tons of fun, just need to build my stamina a little more. And adjust my diet.  Today I ran out of gas because I had virtually no protein.  I can run for a long time on pure carbs but apparently not at this level of activity.  Duly noted, metabolism.  Here, have these mixed nuts and this yogurt.

It’s amazing how dance has taken over my life lately, and I don’t mind at all.

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in other news teaching

D and L, Dancers

Monday night we learned that one of our dancers is fluent in American Sign Language, a topic in which Daniel and I share a real but largely hypothetical interest.  After comparing notes on some signs (the ones we’ve picked up from watching ABC Family’s Switched at Birth are correct, but utterly random–“Ferris wheel”?) and learning that ASL does indeed have its own etymologies (of course the sign for “mother” is meant to evoke a woman tying on her bonnet), we somehow fell onto the topic of name signs.

A name sign is a shortcut way of saying someone’s name so that you don’t have to fingerspell it e.v.e.r.y. s.i.n.g.l.e. t.i.m.e.  How tedious would that be if you were talking about someone named “Persephone” or something?  So you cut it down to the first letter of the person’s name, combined with a sign that illustrates something about that person.  Like on Switched at Birth, one of the main characters is named Bay and her name sign is the letter B waved next to the head to indicate her curly hair.  There are other nuances (Deaf culture is, well, an entire culture!) but that’s the basic idea.

So our dancer showed us the sign for “dance.”  To make our name signs we use the respective first letters of our names (here is D and here is L) in place of the fingers pointing downward/moving back and forth.  How awesome is that?  I also think it is sweet that we have matching name signs.  Perfect for dance partners, right?

Our dancer says further that Marlee Matlin’s appearance on Dancing with the Stars was her inspiration to learn to dance.  I’m a big Marlee Matlin fan too!

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Ballerina Corner dancing in the media in other news

Black Swan: WHAP!

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.

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dancing in the media in other news

PowerPoint or DANCERS?

John Bohannon, creator of Dance Your Ph.D., presents a modest proposal at TEDxBrussels:

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in other news

The Beat

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.

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in other news

Dance as protest

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.