Sunday, August 26, 2007

Dance Reading

Salt Lake City dance instructor Janet Gray is profiled in this Ellen Fagg article in The Salt Lake Tribune:

Against the backdrop of a black T-shirt, Janet Gray's motto is spelled out in rhinestones: "I yell because I care."
The legendary Salt Lake dance instructor, whose ambition and business sense have kept her studio thriving for 30 years, knows she has a reputation. There's the spirit revealed on that T-shirt, after all, plus what's known around the studio as the "Janet Gray voice."
The shirt is just one of Gray's most obvious psychological teaching tools, drawn from her undergraduate training at the University of Utah, where she later returned to teach dance for 16 years. "When I have that on, and I'm giving it to them, students think I care," Gray says. "If I take that prop away and just have a plain shirt on and I yell, sometimes a little tear will come out."


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New York tango culture is explored in this Beckylooo-recommended Times article by Glenn Collins:
It was a sultry 6 p.m. in Central Park, and over by the 1872 Shakespeare statue at Literary Walk, melancholy rhythms spilled from two speakers propped up on park benches.

Courtenay Nugent rose. He asked Fran Beaumont to dance. There they were: the two it took to tango.

They moved sensually across the asphalt pavers, counterclockwise around the monument, under a coquettish breeze and what was to become a limitless starry sky and an oblong moon. As dozens of onlookers watched over the next three hours, about 50 couples swayed to the steps of the dance that has been called a three-minute love affair.


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Ballet partnering is the subject of this post at Neo-Neocon:
You might say that ballet is feminist, in a way, because it gives a prominent—perhaps even a more-than-equal—role to women. You might say it’s retro, in a way, in that the role it gives tends to revolve around traditional ideas of beauty, grace, and supposed fragility masking strength.

But men and women are different, and ballet not only doesn’t ignore that difference, it celebrates it. Partnering in ballet usually involves emphasizing the difference, and as the French say (French, after all, is the language of ballet), “Vive la différence!”


Thanks NTADKaylin!

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