children dancing , dance videos , dancing in the streets , dancing with physical challenges , inspirational dancing , Outdoor Dancing
To Dance With Abandon! On the heels of my Dance Walking posts, I couldn’t resist commenting on this wonderful video. People with Down Syndrome can teach us a lot about dancing with abandon. Dance: The Embodiment of Joy I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: dance is the embodiment of joy. If I […]
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Dancing in Your Wildest Imagination I can’t stop thinking about the Dance Walk Guru’s story. Can you image how it would feel to be so at peace with yourself that you choose to dance down the street with abandon for the pure joy of it, without a worry about what people might think of the […]
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A Dance Movement After All! Well it seems I spoke too soon when I qualified in my last post that Dance Walking was not really a movement but I hoped it would catch on. Apparently it has indeed become a movement and is gathering momentum all over the world as we speak. What fabulous […]
Continue readingConnecting Socially , Dance History , dance videos , inspirational dancing , Lindy Hop , performance dance , same sex dancing , social dancing
I’ve often heard it said that in their dance routines Ginger Rogers did everything Fred Astaire did except she did it backwards and in heels. It’s a popular comment, except of course she didn’t lead and she didn’t choreograph the dance. She did, however, dance in heels and had the bleeding feet to […]
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Stealing Dance Moves Creative dance has always been about stealing. Dancers get ideas from each other and make it their own. After you steal the idea, you change it to suit your own style and it no longer belongs to the dancer who inspired you. The First Lindy Hop Air Step Frankie Manning used […]
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Most musicians don’t dance. Have you noticed that? It’s so common that we really notice when they do. Maybe it’s because they’re always on stage when everyone else is dancing, but that doesn’t explain the ones who do. Cab Calloway not only danced while playing but also was a trend setter who’s style has […]
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Last week I wrote a post about dancing blind, but it really was about dancing temporarily blind. This one is about dancers who are always blind. I’ve written in the past about deaf dancers, dancers in wheel chairs, and dancers with other physical limitations. I’ve never written about blind dancers but they’re out there! […]
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When my dance students are learning the skill of following, I often suggest they close their eyes. Closing your eyes takes away a lot of the urge to back lead, and it brings forward the senses you use to feel the lead. Even when social dancing, I often close my eyes because it’s relaxing and […]
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Before I was a dancer, I was an artist. When I was in art school, I took a trip to Hollywood to see the Art and Technology show. Famous artists of the day like Claus Oldenburg and Andy Warhol teamed up with tech companies like Hewlett Packard to create works of art that utilized the […]
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The wonderful video at the end of this post from 1995 inspired me to write about these dancers because they were both a huge influence in my early dancing years. Sylvia Sykes was my teacher for the first six years I studied Lindy Hop and she, along with her partner Jonathan Bixby, also introduced […]
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Before I was a dance teacher, I taufht self-defense to people with physical disabilities. I was inspired to study American Sign Language when I had a deaf student in one of my classes and a deaf friend in my Jujitsu dojo. I hung out with the deaf community (who thought I had recently lost […]
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Dance and music, in my opinion, go hand in hand. Not everyone agrees, you might be surprised to learn. There are forms of dance that don’t have a connection to music, and I usually don’t like those kinds of dance. I think of dance as making a musical instrument of your body and jamming with […]
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