Dance History , dance videos , inspirational dancing , Lindy Hop , performance dance , teaching dance
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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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! […]
Continue readingabout LaurieAnn , dance videos , dancing with physical challenges , inspirational dancing , leading and following , performance dance , social dancing , teaching dance , west coast swing
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 […]
Continue readingConnecting Socially , Dance History , dance videos , leading and following , Lindy Hop , performance dance , social dancing , tap dance
In my last post about fusion dance I wrote about hip hop and swing. A friend of mine just posted a video of a fusion between Swing and Tap, so I wanted to comment on that as well as on the Swango phenomenon that I’ll address in another post. Lindy Hop has its roots in […]
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The term fusion is used to mean a mix of music as well as dance. In this post I’m focusing on dance fusion. By that I mean two different dances or dance styles fused into one dance. This is a surprisingly controversial thing to do, given that it pretty much mostly happens with street dances […]
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Pole dancing is a popular phenomenon on the exercise dance scene. You can take classes at any fitness level in studios like the one in the photo in the bay area where I live. Formerly a style of dance relegated to sleazy strip joints, it has become a popular fitness dance fad. Aimed […]
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As many of you know, I have had the pleasure of teaching people with various disabilities to dance, having come to dance from a martial arts background where I taught self defense to people with disabilities. I’ve never taught dance to anyone in a wheelchair, but it’s a fascinating challenge. Just like anyone else, a […]
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Dance and music are intrinsically linked. My favorite dances are the ones that arise organically from the music, street dances like Lindy Hop and Hip Hop. There is something special about a dance that makes a dancer out of someone who fell in love with the music, as opposed to a dance with rigid rules […]
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Well, if it’s a good dancer we’re talking about, almost everyone. For many people the obvious answer is well, duh, what does weight have to do with dance skill? But for a lot of people there is a huge prejudice against even a few extra pounds on a dancer. Even today where fat people are hardly […]
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