Dance Web

this deserves a tip-o-the-blog…

Touchy Subject

I don’t know if you are aware, but I am organizing a contingent of belly dancers to attend and dance in the April 25th March for Choice in Washington DC. More info about our delegation can be found here: Belly Bus

As part of encouraging people to show up to the march and dance with us, Simoon and I have had to contact (read as spam) about 1000 dancers in all 50 states.

Without exception, every dancer, regardless of their views on the abortion issue, have responded positively and with an outpouring of support. We have had several women tell us that they would not be attending because they do not agree with our cause, but in each case the women have wished us love, luck and good dancing. We have not had one flame. Not one.

I am so humbled by the professional, respectful response of the belly dance community that I am near tears as I write this. I don’t know of another group of people who would have responded as politely as you have all done to a subject that has been so divisive to the rest of the country. It makes me believe that dance and art truly can heal the world.

I feel honored to be a member of this community and of the greater belly dance community.

Happy Hips to you all
~Dervishspin

dervishspin is one of the prime movers behind the bellybus (previously mentioned here).

one of the things that makes this community of dancers such a pleasure to spend time with… is their amazing sense of support for each other.

[from The Yomiuri Shimbun]Kyomai dancer Inoue dies at 98

Yomiuri Shimbun

Yachiyo Inoue, a living national treasure and the fourth head of the Inoue School of kyomai (traditional Kyoto-style dance), died Friday of a stroke at her home in Higashiyama Ward, Kyoto. She was 98.

A private funeral service will be held Friday for close relatives. The schedule for a public memorial service and the chief mourner have not been finalized.

Inoue was adopted by Yachiyo Inoue III when she was 3 years old. She made her first appearance on the stage at age 5, performing “Shichifukujin” (seven deities of good fortune).

She became an accredited master of the school at age 15.

As an assistant teacher at a school in Higashiyama Ward, she began teaching dance to maiko and geiko entertainers in the Gion district in 1923. In 1931, she married Hiromichi Katayama, the grandson of Yachiyo Inoue III.

She was recommended to be acting head of the Inoue School of kyomai dance after her predecessor died in 1938 and succeeded to the name Yachiyo Inoue IV in 1947.

A performance to mark the succession of her predecessor’s name was held at Minamiza theater near Shijo Ohashi bridge in Higashiyama Ward.

In 1952, Inoue won the Japan Art Academy Award. She also received a prize in the Education Ministry’s art festival the following year for dances titled “Yukimaroge” and “Kiku.”

She was designated a living national treasure in 1955. She was a member of the Japan Art Academy and received the Order of Culture in 1990. She was an honorary citizen of Kyoto.

The Inoue School of kyomai dance developed from a court-style room dance of the Edo period (1603-1868) and a jiutamai dance originating in Kamigata, now Kyoto and Osaka.

Inoue introduced a bunraku puppet-style of acting called ningyo-buri into kyomai dance.

Her graceful and subtle movements were said to create an original world that was unprecedented in any other dances of the Inoue School.

Inoue reportedly had 1,000 disciples since World War II.

She used the name of Aiko Inoue after she appointed her granddaughter Michiko, 47, the fifth head of the school on May 14, 2000, on her 95th birthday.

(from the associated press)
MOSCOW - Sofia Golovkina, who danced for the Bolshoi Theater for nearly three decades and directed its school for more than 40 years, has died. She was 88.

Golovkina died on Feb. 17, the theater announced on its Web site, without specifying the cause of death.

She began dancing for the Bolshoi in 1933 and continued through 1959. Her roles included Aurora in “Sleeping Beauty” and Odette in “Swan Lake.”

When she started dancing, Soviet ballet was under intense pressure to conform to dictator Josef Stalin’s concepts of “socialist realism,” eschewing abstract moves and artistic pretensions regarded as decadent.

She danced the key role in “Bright Stream,” which was denounced by the Communist Party newspaper Pravda in 1936 as “false ballet” and removed from the Bolshoi’s repertoire.

The ballet, a collaboration of composer Dmitry Shostakovich and choreographer Fyodor Lopukhov, tells of a dancer who comes to a collective farm to introduce high-art concepts to the workers.

In 1960, she left the stage and became director of the Moscow Academic Choreography School, where she also taught classical dance. She retired from the school in 2001.

Her tenure “wasn’t just a directorship, it was a dictatorship,” the newspaper Vremya Novostei wrote the day after her death. The newspaper Nezavisimaya Gazeta described her as “Odette with an iron character.”

After the 1991 Soviet collapse, Golovkina complained that state funding for the Bolshoi and its school had dried up. She helped expand its reach, including establishing an academy branch in the U.S. resort town of Vail.

“You used to steal Russian stars. The time has come for you to create your own,” Golovkina told The Associated Press in a 1993 interview in Vail.

No information on survivors was immediately available.

as many of the loyal readers are aware, this system also hosts the regional dance calendar for events throughout virginia, maryland, pennsylvania, delaware, new jersey, west virginia, new york city, and washington dc.

since putting that together (and it is a bit of a hack job, but… always room for improvement), i’ve had several people get in touch and ask me to add events to the calendar, so let me explain some of the motivation for doing this thing…

the general idea behind the dance calendar comes from a frustration with dozens (ok, hundreds) of individual calendars (like this one) on websites that are generally up-to-date, but only represent one or a few dancers… and a few group calendars (like this one) that cover a large number of performers, but get hopelessly out-of-date quickly because one (or a very few) person(s) is (are) responsible for maintaining everything on the list.

to (hopefully) fix this… i’m inviting people i know (and some i know by proxy) to include their events on the dance calendar. the idea is that if there isn’t a single person (for example… me), that has to make all the additions and changes, and if i can coax the computer into keeping the most-relevant stuff at the top (which it does), then the regional calendar can be the best of both worlds - both current and regional.

i don’t want to stay “in the loop” - if i’m not available to make last-minute changes to an event listing, i don’t want that to mean that the changes can’t be made.

if you’ve got events coming up, let me know and i’ll get you set up so you can add (and update!) those events. the more people we have spending a few minutes on this, the better it is for everyone.

update: trying a new approach to the calendar (more recurring-event friendly, and it looks like a calendar rather than a list). you can play with that version here: new dance calendar.

it’s a question i’ve been meaning to ask, in some form or another - these are generally performances, but sometimes, a fortunate soul is hooked by a veil or a hand and dragged into the spotlight…. and then….?

how do you dance with a dancer?

inspired by deserts without dancers, and with an ulterior motive in mind (i really needed to do something like this for an entirely different reason), i give you a map that represents the geographic availability of instructors in any middle eastern/oriental dance form that i could find.

on this map, the circles represent about 45-60 minutes of travel (a figure chosen for compatibility with the deserts without dancers effort - depends a lot on the kind of road in your particular direction). also, no precision here - i just eyeballed the cities.

i eventually decided to include the bhuz list of almost 1000 instructors (973 as i write this). there is some duplication within the bhuz list, but in the interest of the broadest possible coverage, i’ve mapped everything i could find quickly. there’s also an issue of out-of-date material, so some of these points may be locations of former-instructors, or former locations of instructors that have moved.

a couple notes: this is just people who claim to be instructors, only a few of these have comments or references from students. the bhuz data set is also full of errors (los angeles, colorado got my attention).

update (2004.03.25): a couple people have asked about the map - this isn’t the same as the deserts without dancers list - what i’ve mapped is “positive space” - the circles represent places where dance instructors do (or did…) exist. christine is making a list of places where instructors need to exist (”negative space”) because someone’s looking (she might correct me on that). anyway, they are complimentary (positive space vs. negative space).

update (2004.03.26): another question came up regarding the instructor map - someone asked about how many instructors were represented. i didn’t keep a list, but what i can do is provide a general idea. the bhuz list was almost 1000 instructors, and i made no effort to map density - once i found an instructor in a city, i dropped a circle there and moved on (this was a quick effort, not a research project! :) ). anyway, if you are interested in density, i’ve included the “hits” from the bhuz list below the cut here for you. no real surprise, california takes the… lead.

update (2004.03.28): this post has been linked from the deserts without dancers page - just a note, the map represents something like 1100 to 1200 instructors - the vast majority come from the bhuz data set, but it also includes instructors i know personally (a dozen or so), and several more-formal lists from around the web.

(just the state density data below…)

0 - ky, la

1 - mt, sd, wv

2 - ia, nd wy

3 - de, ms

4 - id, me, sc

5 - mn, vt, ak, ar, ri

7 - ne

8 - nh, ct

10 - ks, wi

11 - hi, ok

12 - md, nv

15 - in

16 - nm, pa

18 - ma, ut

19 - az

20 - mo, nc

21 - mi

24 - co, nj, oh

27 - ga, va

28 - al, or

30 - il

45 - wa

57 - fl

58 - ny

78 - tx

171 - ca

an effort to reach out to those spaces that don’t have easy access to instructors or a functional “local scene,” the deserts without dancers directory (you’ll have to dig into the site a bit to get there).

in memoriam….

Ludmila Tcherina, dancing star and choreographer of the Grands Ballets of Monte Carlo, became at the age of 15 under the stage name ?Tcherzina? the youngest star in the history of dance.

more

something i just had to share with everyone, from the baltimore superstars show…

i can only imagine a dark-chocolate-dipped dancer…

for this tour, i managed to mangle my schedule enough to pick up three performances (philadelphia, baltimore and cleveland) with the superstars. late winter is always a strange time for my schedule, so that’s probably pretty good. i’ve been known to caravan with performers for a week or more, but usually a bit later in the year once things have settled down a bit…

i’ve learned a lot (call all those tickets “tuition” :) ), had some assumptions challenged, had some thoughts develop, and generally had a great time sharing space and time with some wonderful people.

the tour is still on, dondi has shared some perspective from the performers’ side of the stage, and it is, truly, an amazing collection of talent.

just for fun (and in a particular order….), thanks for what you do, sonia (who seems to be unlinkable), petite jamilla, rachel brice, dondi, yasmine, ansuya, kaeshi, amar gamal, bozenka, colleen, and glamazons sharon kihara and melodia (did i miss anyone?) also, thanks to the local superstars, and a special nod to issam (who might not look great in a coin-studded bra, but plays a mean drum…)

for now, i’ll leave it at that. pester me for deep thoughts someday…

have a great tour, ladies (and gentleman)… you rawk.