Tag: Samba

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“Story Night”: Dancing With the Stars Season 11, Week 3

So tonight is story night, meaning each dance must tell a little story.

First on are Jennifer and Derek dancing samba. Their story is that she’s a teacher and he’s her student. At first she (pretend) disciplines him then turns into hot teacher and seduces him. Wow, I thought that went very well. Samba is the hardest Latin dance (imo, but I think it’s pretty well accepted). Part of her stunning performance is due to her pants with the shimmies – they really do make you look like you’re shaking it more! But she did have the twisting pelvic action down, and she did really beautifully with most of it. She got a bit too jumpy in the middle, especially after they had a little flub. But they put that crazy hard samba roll in shadow position in toward the end, and those are damn hard. They didn’t have many of them, but still. Big kudos to her for not screwing up the hardest part. By the way, didn’t she look like Sarah Palin with her hair in a bun and the glasses?

Next, Florence and Corky, waltz: They dance to Edelweiss, and interesting – I didn’t know she ever starred in the theater version of The Sound of Music. Their dance is about two people finding a mutual attraction, she’s resistant at first, then they come together. Aw, beyond sweet! The choreography was very basic, but so beautifully executed and so well acted it made you appreciate the simplicity of the steps. I love Corky for doing that! The emotion was subtle and she acted that perfectly, which makes sense of course since she’s an actress. The only thing – and it may be because I’ve recently seen Janie Taylor in Benjamin Millepied’s Why Am I Not Where You Are at NYCBallet, and her character in that is blind at the beginning – but something about Florence’s performance made it seem like she was blind; seemed like she was kind of happy that this guy was sweeping her away, but that she couldn’t see him, was looking through him. I think it was because she kept her head and upper body so still. She really needs to loosen up her back and shoulders and neck.

Next, Kurt and Anna dance foxtrot. Okay, first of all, he says during practice that being 6’2 it’s almost impossible to look good dancing ballroom; he looks like a big tree. Not so! Roberto Bolle, Marcelo Gomes, David Hallberg – Kurt, practically every male ballet dancer I love is huge! Aw, I loved this dance! Story is it’s raining, he has an umbrella, she’s sitting at a bus stop umbrella-less and a bit down, and he cheers her up by sweeping her away. Perfectly done. He was polished, very gentlemanly, had good rise and fall action. Only thing is that he’s still looking a bit stiff in the upper body too. The ballroom frame does feel really unnatural when you’re dancing. Everyone needs to watch videos of pros – like Mirko Gozzoli and Alessia Betti , Jonathan Wilkins and Hazel Newberry, and Katusha Demidova and Arunas Bizokas. The pro dancers on the show should show their celebs more videos! It just helps to have a sense of what you should look like – an idea at least for you to try to emulate. But seriously, he had the rise and fall down pat, he had really good form, he was a good, proper partner, and it was really beautifully done.

Margaret and Louis, samba.

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THE INFLUENCE OF SO YOU THINK YOU CAN DANCE ON DANCE STUDIOS

 

Interesting article by Claudia La Rocco in the NY Times about the influence of SYTYCD on studios. (I missed SYTYCD this week; had really wanted to watch Thursday night but was at New York City Ballet all settled in my seat excitedly waiting for the premiere of Mauro Bigonzetti’s Luce Nascosta when I realized I’d forgotten to tape it).

Anyway, regarding this article: I have noticed in the last few Dance Times Square performance showcases that there have been several student / pro hip hop and lyrical routines (lyrical there meaning balletic modern, without shoes, like a contemporary routine on SYTYCD), which is odd given that it’s a ballroom / Latin studio. And the students are dancing with their same teachers, which means that ballroom / Latin specialists are teaching performance-level hip hop and modern dance. Perhaps in the future ballroom instructors will have to show fluency in more styles to get their jobs.

Broadway Dance Center (mentioned in the article), where I’ve taken ballet and jazz is an excellent studio by the way, if you’re in NY. So is Alvin Ailey extension, where I’ve taken Samba (Brazilian social / Carnival, not ballroom samba). They have everything at AA now, including Salsa and other ballroom dances, though I think they’re more geared toward social than competitive. But I think the attraction to Dance Times Square (aside from the fact the studio owners are now celebrities thanks to SYTYCD) is that they put on performances in real NY theaters, which gives students the chance to dance on a real stage. Alvin Ailey extension does too now; the students are performing in the theater inside AA studios, and Broadway Dance Center has its student showcases in the Martin Luther King Jr. High School auditorium, but it just feels different when it’s on a Broadway stage.

Anyway, I’m getting off track. But I do think dance styles are merging. You see more ballroom routines both in studios’ student showcases and on Dancing with the Stars that are looking lyrical these days, and more Latin routines that are looking very hip hop. And, as is mentioned in the article, some dance styles – like tap – are not visible on SYTYCD at all and are losing popularity in studios as well. I guess no one wants to bother learning an “unpopular” dance style… Nigel Lythgoe told La Rocco he didn’t think tap worked for the show because it’s so specific – it’s too hard to train general dancers in tap at such a level as to get performance-quality work out of them. Obviously it’s the same with ballet. It takes years, decades, to learn proper ballet technique, to even try going on pointe.

I really hope though that Lythgoe will continue trying to introduce general audiences to those styles not in competition on the show. Savion Glover and Jason Samuels Smith will sufficiently wow audiences (one of them has been on before, can’t remember which one), and all he has to do to make the masses swoon over ballet is to have Natalia Osipova on the show. I think the fun of ballroom and hip hop is in large part to learn them yourself, but the excitement of ballet is just watching.

Photo above of Mandy Moore and students by Stanley Kranitz, taken from the Times.

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HAPPY WORLD CUP EVERYONE!

Holy crap, I cannot believe these photos were taken four years ago, right after I’d just started this blog, actually.

 

Like a proper newly obsessed samba fanatic, I’d dragged my friends to a Sushi Samba restaurant in the Flatiron District to watch the final game, between Brazil and … I don’t even remember 🙂 I think we had a lot of caipirinhas… But we also tasted for the first time Feijoada, Brazil’s national dish. It was like comfort food to me, having grown up on Mexican, and I couldn’t get enough of it.

 

 

Alyssa and Kathy were very excited about the farofa, which we sprinkled over it. It looked like parmesan cheese but tasted like very buttery, finely-ground cous-cous. Delicious.

 

These shoes were, and probably ridiculously, remain, the only item of clothing I own that is either green or yellow (Brazil’s colors). I seem to wear all black and red… and it’s funny how in some ways you don’t change.

Anyway … how does four years go so fast?… That was really a blast though. This year, I think I’m going to try to get friends together and do the same — whoever wins, celebrate that country with … what else – food!

Will be hard to take a break from watching my Yankees, but that’s the way it’s going to have to be unless I want to watch them on my home TV which really just doesn’t appeal…

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CAN WE ALL JUST IMAGINE BEING SLAVES?: DWTS'S SAMBA AND RUMBA NIGHT

I don’t have much time to write about this week’s Dancing With the Stars, but quickly, I was pretty disappointed overall, as I guess I usually am with the Samba and Rumba. They seem often to put the two on the same night for some reason. I think Latin is generally harder than Standard and I think these are the two hardest Latin dances, so it’s no wonder they don’t come out so well.

But, honestly — it’s partly because I think the dancers aren’t really teaching the celebrities how to ground their hip movement properly, so that it comes from the movement in the shoulders and lats (back muscles). One of my co-students once told me, when I was first learning Rumba, that the dance originated with the slaves. Rumba walks — the basis of the dance, and the basis of all Latin ballroom dances really — are supposed to stem from the way that slave women would carry heavy loads atop their shoulders. As the woman took a step, the weight coming from her shoulder would push down on that lat muscle, which would eventually bear down on the hip, causing it to settle into the hip socket. When the weight fully settled, she’d start the next step with the other foot, shifting her weight. Those changes in weight are what account for that now sexy-looking shifting of the hips.

But if you’re not taught how to shift the weight properly, how to make it originate from the shoulders — and I think it helps to be given the above visual — then you end up trying to produce that hip shifting only using the hips. And then you get that un-grounded, feathery, hip swaying look which doesn’t look right at all — it looks like the person is just shaking his or her butt. It looks goofy.

I thought basically everyone, with the exception of Mya, had that problem last night. I thought somehow some looked a bit better than others — Natalie, Melissa, and Joanna all somehow managed to look cute even if too light and airy (even for samba, though there’s a bounce, it’s still weighted — it’s not supposed to look like you’re dancing on your toes, like ballet), and Louie looked okay as well (though that might have been because he was partnering Chelsie so well — being such a sturdy support for her and making her look good). And I hate to say it, but Tom was pretty decent too. He has a sense of rhythm I didn’t expect him to have. Even that body roll — I would never in a bizillion years have thought that guy could do a full-body spiraling samba shake like that! But, still, no one but Mya had any semblance of proper grounding, and with the others, it just wasn’t there at all.

Still, everyone tried hard and everyone had the proper character of the dance; everyone had fun. It just shows you how blasted hard Latin actually is.

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JUDGING A BOOK BY ITS COVER

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Sorry posting has been kind of lame over the past week. I’m working really hard on finishing the final read-throughs of my novel and, as always, it’s more involved than I expected. I have several exciting Fall For Dance programs still to write about — a puppet-performed Petrushka, Bronislava Nijinska’s Les Biches, the fabulous Trocks, Dance Brazil’s unique capoeira / samba / modern blend, Tiler and Gonzalo 😀 , the best Afternoon of a Faun (involving two fauns actually) I’ve ever seen — this is by far the best FFD Festival I can remember — and I plan to write about it all at the end of the weekend or early next week; after, hopefully, I’ve finished my rewrites.

In the meantime, above is my final cover. Took me forever to okay something I was happy with. At first I was going to go with this one:

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But then I had dinner with a gay male friend, who said of this bottom one, “Okay. This looks like it’s about a girl who goes around New York giving blow jobs.”

Which my novel is NOT about! I sought others’ opinions — nearly drove all of my friends crazy — and most people agreed that, since it’s about a young woman with a disorder, the cover should indicate that. It’s just that the disorder she develops is due in part to her moving into the city — a city she feels largely alienated by — and so it’s partly about her ability to make her own home here. Which is why I thought an arty cityscape would work.

But apparently not with this title!

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I’d gotten the idea for the arty cityscape cover from my favorite Breakfast at Tiffany’s edition.

I also love this cover, for Charles Jackson’s The Lost Weekend:

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This is as large as I could blow it up, but it’s one of my very favorite covers. I’d asked my design team to come up with something similar (with a woman looking into the abyss), and they couldn’t. I showed a friend and she kind of burst out laughing and told me I’d need to hire an artist to make me something wholly original if I wanted something approaching it. I have that Lost Weekend edition (which I found at a rare bookstore in Durham, NC) and the cover is an actual piece art — it’s actually painted onto the cover, which is made of a sturdier material than regular covers — the result being that once the years go by and the cover ages, you literally can’t open the book without breaking it. So, the irony is that that book is unreadable; it must simply sit on my bookshelf facing out, to showcase the piece of visual art that it’s now solely become.  In any event, even if I did want a book that could only be enjoyed for its cover, I don’t have the money to hire my own artist.

But I think my design team came up with something that works anyway.

My biggest problem with having a photo of a woman on the cover is that I was afraid it’d be taken for Chick-lit, a moniker I think every female writer has some kind of issue with, or at least thinks about. I thought an illustration would make it look like it’s about art — which it partly is: one of the protagonist’s friends is an artist and he’s an important character. And I thought a photo of a woman would alienate male readers. But then a friend who works as an artistic director of a magazine said illustrations don’t sell; you gotta have a photo, which she insisted was pertinent to books as well as magazines (and she has two published books of her own out). She’s one of four or five people (as I said, I drove all of my friends stark raving nuts) who helped me come up with the idea for my final cover.

…which I’m happy with — I think it hints at what the book is about and is dramatic and somewhat provocative without being over the top. I just hope it doesn’t alienate potential male readers. But then, as practically everyone I know (of both sexes) have told me ad nauseam, men don’t read anyway — especially fiction; women read and Chick-lit sells. So just embrace it.

Anyway, there are many other issues involved in the whole Chick-lit quandary, and in book cover art, but I’ve blabbered for too long. Have to get back to my rewrites… And I need to go out for my Friday cupcake.

Have a good weekend everyone!

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BRAZILIAN INDEPENDENCE DAY CELEBRATION AT ALVIN AILEY STUDIOS

 

Alvin Ailey studios (which offers adult classes in everything from ballet to salsa to capoeira) is planning a big shindig to celebrate Brazilian Independence Day, on Sunday, September 13th.

Quenia Ribeiro (whose classes I’ve taken — and even lived to tell 🙂 ) and Tiba Vieria will spend the day (11 am- 7 pm) teaching Macuele (an Afro-Brazilian dance), Capoeira, Samba drumming, and of course Samba dancing — both the Bahia (Reggae) style and the Rio style — the latter in high-heeled platform shoes. The day will culminate with with “Bloco Ribeiro,” a performance and parade led by Quenia and her band up and down 55th Street. Costumes and props will be provided for participants.

Fun fun! Go here for a schedule and more info.

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IS MAINSTREAM AMERICA STILL HOMOPHOBIC?

So, the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamantion called Nigel Lythgoe on his anti-gay comments on SYTYCD last week and Lythgoe apologized. I missed last week’s show, but according to the Times he told a male ballroom duo that he didn’t think the show’s audiences would be receptive to them and that, though they’d had men dancing with other men on the show before, they’d never danced “in each other’s arms.” (The pair danced Samba). Lythgoe said on the show that he’d like to see them both “dancing with a girl.”

Lythgoe rightly apologized for his comments and word choice but my question is, is such a couple really not right for the show’s audience (which is mainstream America)? Would people these days really get so upset over watching two men ballroom dance together? I’ve lived in New York for so long now (and been part of the dance world) that I feel I’ve kind of lost touch with middle America. I mean, would the average American seriously be offended?

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THE GIRL NEXT DOOR? NO, MELISSA RYCROFT IS MORE LIKE A GLAMOROUS OLD-TIME HOLLYWOOD STARLET!

Well, I was on a train late last night and missed watching the Dancing With the Stars semis on TV. Now I realize how hard the show makes it for you to catch re-runs. Geesh. Rickey doesn’t have everything posted, so I went to YouTube, and they have most of the competition routines, but the sound quality is crap and subtitles (in, for example, Gilles’s visit to his hometown, Cannes, with the French interviews with his mother and friends) are cut off. And they didn’t have the full episode. The YouTube clips re-direct you to this website, but once there, they just keep making you take these ridiculous quizzes, telling you, eventually the site will be unlocked. Well, it never unlocked for me — instead they redirected me to more and more quiz websites. I hope that site’s not a scam that unleashes some kind of virus or something. Anyway, people beware: don’t try to watch re-runs on watchdancingwithstars.com.

Anyway, I at least saw the routines. I only saw the bio on Gilles. Were there bios on the rest of the competitors? If not, that’s kind of silly, interesting as his little trip to Cannes was.

So, semis consisted of: Mark and Shawn dancing Jive and Argentine Tango; Melissa and Tony Quickstep and Cha Cha; Ty and Chelsie Samba and Viennese Waltz; and Gilles and Cheryl Salsa and Waltz (although one YouTube clip called it a Quickstep).

My favorites were Mark and Shawn’s Argentine Tango and both dances by Melissa and Tony.

Continue reading “THE GIRL NEXT DOOR? NO, MELISSA RYCROFT IS MORE LIKE A GLAMOROUS OLD-TIME HOLLYWOOD STARLET!”

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YET MORE INJURIES, RIDICULOUSLY DANGEROUS LIFTS AND JUDGMENTS BASED ON A MARKING REHEARSAL???

What is up with this show? Dancing With the Stars really made me mad this week. I’m kind of tired — have a big week (New York City Ballet begins, Stephen Petronio and Trisha Brown Dance Co’s open, and I have about 10,000 Tribeca Film Festival films to see, plus am trying to take computer skills classes since I virtually have none as well as schedule a visit to Bushwick, Brooklyn, where a new performance company which I’m a board member of  — first time being a board member for me!!! — is trying to rent a space) — so please forgive me if I’m cranky. But when I got home from a full day of craziness and watched my tape of the show, a few things just got on the only remaining nerve I have left right now.

First, we’re told Melissa can’t compete because of a fractured rib, which we later learn she sustained doing a crazy lift / back flip over Tony’s entire, standing body. Then, we see Cheryl being short and nasty with Gilles over his inability to do a lift, which he’s having real problems with because of a shoulder injury. He forces himself to go along with her, does an insane aerial-filled Lindy Hop, and does okay (although there was a timing flub on the first somersault lift thing; the one she was yelling at him over in practice), but, to me, you could see the pain on his face. And his kicks, his Charleston, everything was just lacking energy, though he tried to hide it, like a pro. Then, since Melissa can’t dance because of the rib injury, they judge her based on a previous practice rehearsal at which she and Tony are mainly marking the routine. I can’t believe they even showed that on live TV! Of course it was awful.

Ugh. The problem is that these lift-filled routines are too blasted hard for non-pros. Even regular ballroom dancers aren’t used to doing them — and that is mainly who is training these competitors. I mean, I’m kind of torn between wanting the pros to take the contestants as far as they can possibly go so TV audiences can witness the thrill of really virtuosic dance, and just wishing they’d put some professional ballet or exhibition dancers on the show for that kind of stuff. Let audiences ooh and aaah over the real pros at this kind of thing. It’s way too much for people who’ve never danced before in their lives. It’s honestly really shocking to me that there aren’t more injuries. I mean, when I was dancing, I really wanted to be challenged too, but you have to stop and realize what you’re risking if you’re not a pro dancer; you have to take care of your body.

And in the real world, I’m sorry, but Melissa would be off. If you can’t compete in the Prix de Lausanne, at Blackpool, then, you know, the judges don’t go basing your score a rehearsal tape you send them. That’s ridiculous. If the show would have real rules, then maybe the pros, the producers — whoever’s making the dance decisions here — wouldn’t push non-dancers way the hell too far so that they risk serious injury in the first place.

Anyway, no one really blew me away tonight. Gilles was good but looked fatigued and nervous about the lifts, Ty and Shawn’s routines were meant primarily to showcase Chelsie and Mark respectively — and they did, but I didn’t watch the contestants at all. Chuck’s Cha Cha was okay but generally underwhelming compared to his excellent Samba last week. And Lil Kim — well, she was pretty good. I thought it was a bit more about the facial expressions at first, but she came through on the dancing and did really well. Overall, she was my favorite this week.

The group dances: The group Mambo was cute though; the ending goofy corny fun. The pros totally outshone the amateurs but I still liked it. I kind of wish they’d have used real Mambo music though. But Wow, the group Tango was Excellent! The amateurs here — Ty, Gilles and Lil Kim — were better than those in the Mambo. The choreography was gorgeous and everyone danced perfectly in sync when dancing together, and all three amateurs looked really good out there — almost like pros. Ty blew me away. Completely blew me away. His footwork was excellent, his posture perfect, his handhold absolutely right — he was so polished! He looked like a real dancer out there! Len is right — he nailed it.

Okay, so overall, my faves of the night were Lil Kim’s main dance, and Ty in the group Tango.

I have NO IDEA what’s going to happen tomorrow night.

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DWTS: MIXED DANCES, GROUP DANCES, AND CONTESTANT-DESIGNED COSTUMES MEAN THE WOMEN ARE ACTUALLY CLOTHED FOR A CHANGE

So the contestants have designed the costumes this time. For the most part, they look better. I really like Julianne’s snazzy red fringe — her boyfriend dresses her well 🙂 And I love Edyta’s floor-length robe, although I’m sure it’s going to come off at some point…

Tony and Melissa’s Argentine Tango: That was really quite nice. There was a lot of basic dancing with a lot of intricate footwork, and a few flashy lifts thrown in here and there, but it wasn’t about the lifts. And she had excellent leg lines on those lifts. And I like how Tony varied those lines — the first had a clean split, the second both legs in attitude. Very good choreography and very good dancing.

Lawrence and Edyta’s Waltz: Aw, I love Journey’s Open Arms!

Continue reading “DWTS: MIXED DANCES, GROUP DANCES, AND CONTESTANT-DESIGNED COSTUMES MEAN THE WOMEN ARE ACTUALLY CLOTHED FOR A CHANGE”

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Dancing With the Stars, Week Two: Samba and Foxtrot

Maks and Denise’s Samba: Okay that was awful. Sorry but it was. She was hopping and running and skipping and doing just about everything but Samba. It is the hardest of the Latin dances — Len’s right, but still. I agree with Bruno that it wasn’t so hot, but don’t know if I’d call if flat as a “waffle”. And I agree with Carrie Ann– how frightened and stiff did she look?! During those Samba rolls, it looked like he was pulling her on top of him, then pushing himself onto her. Like she was the cat being forced to dance with Pepe le Peu. Interesting choreography from Maks — the one-legged hops, the waving his chest toward hers, flirtatiously. Extremely corny having him come to practice dressed as a Carmen Miranda-esque sambista to get her to stop being so serious. And don’t tell adults to feel and not think, Maks! Can’t be done. You learn by feeling as a child, as an adult you have to think; you’ve lived too much of your life by using your brain by then.

Chuck and Julianne’s Foxtrot: That was pretty good. Fairly suave, though he looked a bit of a goof on those side by sides in the middle. A little too much on his toes, I think was what it was. And it was pigeon-toed at that. He just looked a little Pee Wee Herman-ish. But overall, very sophisticated and he looked fairly comfortable in the close hand-hold. Yeah, Carrie Ann just said on the grapevine it looked like he hunched over a bit — maybe that’s what made it Pee Wee-like to me. He’s better at Standard than Latin.

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DANCE BRAZIL!

 

(Late) reminder: DanceBrazil’s live webcast begins tonight (Sunday) at 6:45 EST. Go here for deets.

Alyssa and I saw them Friday night at the Skirball Center and Alyssa said it was they best dance event I’d ever invited her to 🙂 I greatly enjoyed it too. There were two pieces, Ritmo and Inura ( the second having its world premiere). Ritmo (from 2008, choreographed by company head Jelon Vieira) is what they’re live-casting tonight. I’d reviewed it earlier and liked it then, but they did something to improve it substantially. I loved it Friday night. I really can’t recommend it highly enough. It’s so worth watching, believe me. It’s basically just a wonderful celebration of Brazilian dance — mainly capoeira, which is a martial arts dance originating in the 16th and 17th centuries by slaves and celebrates the slave’s ability to outsmart the master. Some may see capoeira as a bunch of “tricks” but I think that is a ballet or perhaps modern hip hop mentality (I say ballet because I think those critics are likening the astounding jumps, mid-air turns, and balances on one’s neck, to ballet’s barrel turns, huge jetes, bizillions of fouettes, etc). But the “tricks” here are not so much to wow the audience, but to celebrate the slave’s triumph, his ability to mentally and physically “out-trick” his captors. But there’s more — there’re also a few Samba sections :D, and some parts comprised of beautiful combination modern / Afro-Brazilian movement. In one section, a dancer does what I’ve heard in hip hop referred to as a caterpillar. But he does it so much more poetically than I’ve ever seen; his body gains such momentum on the repeated up and down moves, he begins to look like an ocean wave.

Inura, choreographed by Carlos Dos Santos Jr. which made its world premiere this season at Skirball (but is not being live-broadcast today), is a celebration of Exu, who, in Afro-Brazilian Yoruba tradition, the program notes state, is the messenger between the world of the people and that of the gods, and also the guardian of the energy that moves the universe. Inura is “the manifestation of the Exu energy that exists in each of us.” There are scenes of worship, of a goddess being exalted, raised high by a group of men, of a prince and princess flirting, then consummating their relationship, with a near-naked Yul Brynner-looking man sitting atop a mirror beside them, in various poses accentuating his skin, his musculature, in a kind of celebration of humanity, perhaps representing the human being they will create?

The movement in Inura is contemporary with of course a definite Afro-Brazilian bent. The company is comprised of four female dancers (at least ideally; Vieira has only two for now), four male dancers, and four capoeira artists and it’s interesting to see how he and the other choreographers who work with him use the capoeira artists in a contemporary dance. In one scene, there are several bodies supine on the ground, as if sleeping, and the capoeira men come out and dance over and around them — jumping over them, kicking out in all directions — as if they are protecting them in their sleep from either captors or evil spirits. One man does in back of the group what in hip hop would be termed a “flare” and it looks like as he’s spinning around down there, he’s just whipping all those evil spirits right away.

Afterward, there was a short question and answer session with the artists and one woman remarked how “the youth of today” — meaning, today’s young hip hop / break dancers, are using many of these same moves, totally unaware of their origins, thinking mistakenly that they’re creating them. It was exactly what I was thinking, and judging by all the nods and “um – hums!” was a thought shared by many in that auditorium. She continued, saying how sad it was that these young dancers don’t seem aware of this aspect of their roots — this African slave dance centuries old. So true. Perhaps dance elitists who trash hip hop and break-dancing don’t understand that either.