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."

Read more...

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.

Read more...

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.

Read more...