The Photographer at Work

Because turnaround really is sometimes fair play, I post a photo that Leslie Kase has now sent my way—me behind the camera Saturday, freezing young dancers for eternity's sake.

We have a good time, those of us who join in for the Dancing Classrooms Philly extravaganza—getting lost on flights of stadium stairs, corralling children, begging for just half of that salty soft pretzel, and urging the make-up lady to shower us with a smidgen of her glitter. Finally we step back and then: the show belongs to children.

You can't hear it, but imagine this: An entire basketball stadium's worth of screamers, urging the gallant on. Calling out school names. Calling out dancers. Waving signs the size of four people.

Better than basketball on a good day.

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The Shadow Catcher and the Word "Beautiful"

I am there, in the round chair in the thin room, the day coming in through the slender screen, and I am reading—finishing the final pages of Marianne Wiggins' odd and remarkable The Shadow Catcher (a WG Sebald-like melage, a tour of the early lives of the photographer Edward Curtis and the woman he married, an inverted commentary on the making of a novel, a discourse on sound). Outside it is still, save for the bounce-echo of the ball that my son sends up and down the driveway.

I don't know how much time has passed. I think, perhaps, too much. That I went away inside a book and that I need, somehow to return to the day. To my responsibilities.

So I call to my son, through the screen, "Hey there."

Which must, to him (the distortion of distance, the ruffle of tree limbs between where I sit and where he stands), sound like a question, for he calls back, "Yes, Beautiful?"

And I sink. And I have nothing to say. He has disarmed me, the way that he does. Using a word so rare and heartbreaking.

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To Be Young Again, To Dream

Scenes from Dancing Classrooms Philly, Finals, June 6, 2009.
Sponsored by Harvey and Virginia Kimmel and The Connelly Foundation, among other fine and loving Philadelphians and institutions.

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Dancing Classrooms Philly

Last year I had the privilege of bearing witness to the Dancing Classrooms Philly program—of meeting those who teach and those who dance and those who make it possible. Today's two-minute vlog tells the story briefly, with but a handful of the more than 1,000 photographs that I took over the course of several days. Background music is "Caresse Sur L'Ocean," Bruno Coulais. The words are drawn from an essay I wrote to commemorate the program's launch in Philadelphia.

Thanks to Harvey Kimmel, Jane Brooks, Joyce Burd, and Leslie Swinney Kase for launching the program here in Philadelphia. Thanks to Pierre Dulaine and Yvonne Marceau for conceiving the program in the first place. Their story is brilliantly told in the documentary "Mad Hot Ballroom."

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Dance Politics

A few weeks ago, Tara Parker-Pope wrote a jazzing story in the New York Times that she called "Dance Even if Nobody is Watching." It was a short piece with that most-delicious, invigorating, tears-for-happiness Matt Harding youtube at its heart (you haven't seen it? you have to see it. click on the link below). Parker-Pope's story was short and it was definitive: Dance for joy. Dance for your health. (Thank you, Denise Cowie, for sending the story on.)

http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/07/10/dance-even-if-nobody-is-watching/?ex=1216526400&en=7286a589f5b04fb3&ei=5070&emc=eta1

This morning, I got all caught up in another superior story about dance, and I share it with you here; I encourage you to read in full the essay by Philadelphia dance choreographer Rebecca Davis, who went to Rwanda to teach orphan boys to dance and who emerged from her month in that genocided land with a question I hope she won't mind my repeating: If an exchange of dance moves can transcend barriers of language, race and age, couldn’t dance also play an important role in rebuilding an individual, a family or perhaps even a nation? The boys Davis met could dance, oh, they could dance. They were orphans. They had been stolen from—the very worst kind of stealing. And yet, inside the frame of their dancing, there was joy, there was heart, there was healing.

http://www.broadstreetreview.com/article.php?idc=5&ida=985

Dance as politics, Davis suggests. Dance as medicinal, a salve.

I'll vote for that. I will cast my ballot for the politician who casts a gaze out upon the gathering crowds, who sees people there, yearning people, not just voters, and who sets aside his or her rhetoric for a song turned up loud. For the politician who bows to the exultant, bonding gift of dance.

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The Art of Happiness

I made the mistake, the other day, of watching myself dance on tape, and there, inside those 90 seconds, were all the demons that have forever chased me. I still don't quite yet believe in me on a stage. Don't believe that I belong beneath the lights, or that my turn has come.

But yesterday, while taking a lesson with the ever-brilliant Jean Paulovich (who will tomorrow be dancing with his very beautiful and equally talented wife, Iryna, on the Music Pier of Ocean City), I did my best to listen to what he had to say. And the thing is: He was not talking only about the spine and the chin and the arrangement of the head, not just imploring me (again) to wait. He was saying the simplest thing—that happiness counts, that joy has its place, that when you really love dance, the way I believe I love dance, passion alone should settle one's frame into the escalation and hush of music. It should be the story your face tells.

It's something I should have known myself, of course. Something, certainly, that the kids of Dancing Classrooms have taught me. My photo today is of Philadelphia's most recent winners, a glorious team taught by my friend and fellow dancer, Linda Camardo.

I'm writing about vulnerability and storytelling on the HarperTeen blog, a fabulous myspace site, today. The link is here, below. For giving me room there, and for being tremendously responsive, I thank Lisa Bishop.

http://blog.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=blog.view&friendID=72210576&blogID=409718323

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HOUSE OF DANCE, Starred PW Review

House of Dance/Starred review
Beth Kephart. HarperTeen/Geringer, $16.99 (272p) ISBN 978-0-06-142928-6
Distinguished more by its sharp, eloquent prose than by its plot, Kephart’s (Undercover) second YA novel probes the fear of loss by introducing a heroine who overcomes it. Abandoned by her father years ago, emotionally distant from her mother, who is caught up in an affair with her married boss, 15-year-old Rosie spends much of the summer before junior year with her terminally ill, widower grandfather, helping him sort through his belongings, all of them stuffed with mementos. As his health rapidly declines, Rosie realizes: “You cannot buy a man who is dying a single meaningful thing. You can only give him back the life he loved and awaken the memories.” Determined to retrieve the time her grandfather misses most, when music filled the evenings and he could watch his wife dance, Rosie sets about throwing a dance party at her grandfather’s house. Poetically expressed memories and moving dialogue both anchor and amplify the characters’ emotions. Ages 12–up. (June)

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Anne with an E, and Dance

It took me all these years to read ANNE OF GREEN GABLES, and now I am wondering how I ever lived without. I feel her on my shoulder, wherever I venture to now. I hear her insisting on the imagination, think of her faced with a newly bloomed peony, run off to the street, as I'm sure Anne would have done, whenever the Clydesdales are brought down my way at dawn, set free from their tents at the transitory horse show. Anne with an E seized upon the possible. She insisted on living each day as a last. She went about her world enthralled—looking for, hoping for goodness.

Saturday Anne was with me, too—with me and a few hundred others as Dancing Classrooms Philly conducted its Spring 08 finals competition at Drexel University. The foxtrot, the merengue, the rumba, the tango, the swing had transformed these young dancers from West and North Philadelphia. The glitter on their skirts and ties, the sunset peach above the young girls' eyes, the flowers perched, the shirt tails in, the reverberatory cries of the crowd as Pierre Dulaine urged the spectators on. The teaching artists, too: They had transformed these kids—they had changed the way they walked and stood, the way they honored one another, the way they dreamed. It was hot, and it was crowded, and the whole place throbbed, and as I took photograph after photograph of angled arms and intertwined hands, I felt Anne near—the irrepressible pulse of her.

Dance is a gift given. It is the self, rising.

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Dancing Classrooms Philly

I'll be down in Philadelphia today, judging and photographing the semi-finals of Dancing Classroom Philly's second season. A program brought to life in New York by the extraordinary ballroom dance team, Pierre Dulaine and Yvonne Marceau, documented in that fab 2005 film "Mad Hot Ballroom," and transplanted to Philadelphia just last fall, Dancing Classrooms is where you want to be if you're looking for kids who are willing to step on a stage and dream.

For kids who stand face to face, and dance.

For kids all busted through with pride.

The flowers will fall from their hair. The glitter will rain down from their faces.

The crowds (and there are crowds) will go absolutely wild.

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Gratitudes

Well, the tree is in the house now, and it shimmers. Gift boxes are tumbling from my closet shelves (there are only a few shelves, and it's not a big closet). The cards are at the printer. I have my hostess gifts and the nice lady at the department store wrapped them so that they'll actually LOOK like hostess gifts. Tonight I'll dance that cha-cha and may or may not fall off my three-inch heels, but whatever happens, it will have already happened by this time tomorrow.

(If only I could finish that mega-gigantic corporate web site for my client. If only they'd stop adding sections!)

So today as I sit down at my computer and think about the world outside my door (fog enwrapped, at the moment), I think about how grateful I am for the conversations I've found myself having with those of you who have generously spent some time hanging out on this blog. You just don't know what is going to happen when you open yourself up to the world, and I've had luck on my side. What is the real world? It's an obvious question. For sure my real world includes you.

Tomorrow I'm off to the finals of that citywide ballroom dancing competition, where the fifth graders of Philadelphia will no doubt put on one heck of one fabulous show. These are stunningly beautiful children (one of my photos of the semi-finals above). If you are anywhere near the Merriam Theater on Philly's Broad Street tomorrow, do yourself the favor of seeing such beauty on the stage.

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