Tag Archives: successful

Practice Makes Perfect

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Winston and Lily Chow wide 600x450
The worlds of competition dancing and social dancing don’t overlap too much. Sometimes the studios where they learn do overlap, though. Wilddancer and wife took many lessons from another Senior Champion, James Kleinrath, at the now-extinct Imperial Ballroom in Redwood City, CA, where we frequently saw Winston and Lily Chow practicing. Their devotion and discipline were admirable, and it paid off when they won a Senior Championship. James told us that to become really good dancers, one needs to enjoy practicing. Perhaps that separates competition dancers from social dancers, because we did not have the time nor the attitude to do that much practice. And we wanted to be able to do a wider range of dances than most competitors can do, enabling us to dance in a wide range of venues to a wide range of music. Plus, the social dance floor is a whole different place, with dancers of all abilities that need to be avoided, while competitors normally can expect other competitors to obey the “rules of the road”.
 

Annual Dance Conference Excels

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The dance world is rapidly reaching critical mass, if developments at the combined conference of the World Dance Alliance-Americas (WDA-A) and the Dance Critics Association (DCA) held at the one-of-a-kind Scotiabank Dance Center in Vancouver, BC, Canada during July 29-August 4 are any indication. Highlights included world-class innovative dance routines, strong coverage of the burgeoning urban dance category, a brand-new dance journal, expansion of the WDA to Europe with a fully worldwide conference in Angers (France) in 2014, and a massive government effort to catalog and measure dance in all its forms within Canada. The event was all the more noteworthy because the two organizations are all-volunteer ones, so all the heavy lifting was being done as a labor of love. WDA-A Conference Committee Chairman Scott Martin was everywhere, and did a terrific job before and during the event

The conference focused on dances that are performed for audiences, so the only participants who actually dance are the performers on stage, who take part in “concerts”. In social couples dancing, which—with the exception of Wilddancer—was essentially unrepresented at this conference, there is no audience, everyone participates, and the events are called “parties”. But the WDA-A seems happy to include all forms of dancing, so we will likely see and hear more about social couples dancing in the future, with support from Wilddancer. And with the strong feeling that the organization wanted to be inclusive, to welcome all forms of dance, and to chronicle changes in the dance world as they happen, the WDA-A is in a strong position to grow and adapt. We expect that social couples dancing will be the beneficiary as rhythms and movements from other categories, or even whole new dances, are integrated into what is already being practiced in ballrooms and club venues. We are particularly interested to see what, if any, changes will come via a flow from urban dance (AKA hip hop or break dancing), which is already a social phenomenon but not specifically for couples.

(During the DCA portion of the conference veteran critic George Jackson pointed out an interesting overlap between ballet and lindy hop. Pioneering dance critic Carl Van Vechten wrote in 1930 that the new Lindy Hop would likely follow the pattern he had observed with the Cake Walk, Bunny Hug, Turkey Trot, Charleston, and Black Bottom, in which roughly every decade a black dancer would invent a new step that would become popular with black (and sometimes with white) dancers. Whether or not it was ever done, Van Vechten pointed out that the Lindy Hop “could be danced, quite reasonably, and without alteration of tempo, to many passages in the Sacre du Printemps [Rite of Spring] of Stravinsky” (see Swinging the Machine: Modernity, Technology, and African American Culture between the World Wars, by Joel Dinerstein, University of Massachusetts Press, 2003.))

Can a New Song and a New Movie Reignite Interest in Hustle?

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People say that The Twist killed touch dancing. And that about 15 years later the Disco craze (with its signature Hustle dance) brought it back (for a while, at least). (More recently, Hip Hop, which is influencing what “freestyle” dancers do when there is a dance floor and rap music, may be killing touch dancing again.) According to Bloomberg Businessweek, the hottest song this summer is Get Lucky, from a pair of 40-year-old French guys called Daft Punk. Get Lucky has a solid disco beat, which ought to please dancers who still do, or can do, the Hustle. Since it took from the song’s release on April 19 until the July1 Businessweek issue, and Wilddancer hasn’t heard it yet on a dance floor, it may take more than this song to make Hustle popular again. Interestingly, though, was the purposely seductive way the song was introduced, which seems to have been initiated more by the musicians than the marketing folks at Columbia Records. Even more interesting to us, though, was that the marketers discovered that their audience wanted to participate in the launch, saying that they felt “We don’t want to be treated like consumers. We want to be treated like dance partners.” It remains to be seen how many of those (passive) listeners will become (active) dancers.
And another very recent boost to this disco theme occurs in the new (July 5, 2013) movie from popular Spanish director Pedro Almodovar, titled I’m So Excited, from the eponymous 1982 disco hit by the Pointer Sisters. Three gay flight attendants on this farcical “flight from Hell” do a dance routine to the song (which is unmistakably a Hustle tune, though on the slow side for Hustle dancers).
Hustle dancing’s heyday was marked by the Saturday Night Fever movie and jammed disco dance spots like Studio 54, and like many fads it declined dramatically over time as the “fever” subsided. But the dance itself is sexy, Hustle groups have stayed active around the USA, and there is an association (the International Hustle Dance Association). There is even an IHDA Bronze Hustle Manual written by Billy Fajardo, Jami Josephson, and DVIDA that has been accepted by the NDCA (National Dance Council of America). We understand that this manual serves as a syllabus to guide judges for competitions. Most of the other books on Hustle—including The Engineer’s Guide to Hustle Dancing—are a little long in the tooth, so the real proof that Hustle is being reborn would be publication of Silver and Gold level sibling manuals by the IHDA.

Why Some Dance Studios Prosper

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Wilddancer’s research into the social couples dancing industry so far suggests that the overall demand for dance lessons is either declining or not growing enough to say so. We spent a couple of days visiting studios in Las Vegas, and came away with some impressions. Dance studios are small organizations and the owners are usually busy teaching, so there wasn’t time for lengthy, in-depth discussions. But a few things stood out. First, like any other business, the better the quality and quantity of effort and thought you put in, the better the results you get. Second, as the nature of the demand changes you have to change with the times and make your offerings match the demand. (The best example here may be Hip Hop. There isn’t any standard version of this. But likely some of the pieces will end up coalescing into a meaningful whole or changing the look of some of the other “street dances”. In any case, it seemed that the more successful studios all offered Hip Hop; we didn’t have time to sample their offerings, but we suspect that they were quite dissimilar.) Third, with all the other things competing for the mindshare of dancers (and prospective future dancers), you have to be opportunistic. (We were particularly impressed with the “Wine, Dine & Dance” event held subsequently by DanceCenter on May 25 that “did well by doing good”, raising over $1,200 for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing.)