Tag: dance

Ginger Rogers & Fred Astaire – Swing Time

6:01 pm

An evening pause: From the 1936 film of the same name. Fred improvises to save Ginger’s job as a dance teacher. Watch how Rogers’ impression of him and her interaction during the dance evolves so naturally. I have always found her to be not only a great dancer, able to keep up with Astaire (the king of all dance), but also a marvelous actress.

Note too how this is not the gymnastics of modern dance, which is often only one small step above a Jane Fonda exercise video, but an amazingly nuanced and choreographed sequence of complex steps and moves, set to American pop music but with graceful classical ballet in mind.

Hat tip Judd Clark.

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Riccardo Cocchi & Yulia Zagoruychenko – 2018 Fred Astaire Cup Latin dance competition

6:01 pm

An evening pause: The camera soon focuses on this couple, whose performance eventually won the competition, which apparently was their tenth victory. As noted in the comments, “You don’t understand exactly how great they are until you see them in a roomful of other people dancing the same dance.”

Hat tip Judd Clark.

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Jason Colacino and Katie Boyle – Honky Tonk

6:01 pm

An evening pause: How about some hot dancing today? Some truly original moves that I think Fred Astaire would applaud.

Hat tip Mike Nelson. Note too that he found this on X. It is nice to give youtube some competition.

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Kabardinka Ensemble – Dance of the Black Sea Circassians

6:01 pm

An evening pause: From the webpage:

A collection of various Circassian dance figures and influenced by the Western Adyghe tribes Ubykh, Natukhay and Shapsug who once used to populate the Black Sea coasts of the Northwest Caucasus for thousands of years with their Abkhazian cousins before they were completely exiled from the region by Russian Empire in 1864.

The solo dances are especially hypnotic. There are also many elements that resemble Irish dance.

Hat tip Judd Clark.

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Tchaikovsky – Waltz of the Flowers

6:01 pm

An evening pause: Most people today likely associate this music with space stations and spacecraft in space (influenced by the movie 2001: a Space Odyssey), but this video shows the real reason it was written, for dancing the waltz.

Hat tip Judd Clark.

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Fred Astaire & Ginger Rogers – Never Gonna Dance

6:01 pm

An evening pause: We’ve had a lot of 1970s pop songs and dance recently. Here’s an example of one of the greatest movie dance numbers, from the 1936 movie Swing Time. Note how smooth and ballet-like it is, unlike the staccato and gymnastic styles that began to dominate dance after the 1960s.

Note also the remarkable lack of cuts. The dance is performed with only one cut, which means Astaire and Rogers had to get it perfect, the whole way through each of these two shots. It took 47 takes before they succeeded.

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