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Robert
Abrams is just a regular guy who fell in love with dance
and decided to help support dance's continued
availability.
He
wasn't always a dancer. His parents made him take dance
lessons in middle school, but at the time very few
people at school parties were interested in formal
social dance.
It
wasn't until he moved to Santa Cruz, California as an
adult that he became obsessed with dance. A
strong need - a new town, a new job and a need to be
distracted in the evenings to keep his mind off the
recent death of his mother, combined with a welcoming
environment - a group of UC-Santa Cruz students called
the Swinging Slugs who met twice a week and proved to be
very friendly and supportive, turned an enjoyable
activity into a vital art.
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Carried
along by his friends' enthusiasm, Robert started taking
private lessons and then began competing in Ballroom.
This eventually led to three competitions in three weeks
with three different teachers in three different cities,
after which he was broke. He took a break from
lessons. He happened to see Swango at Swing 46 and
rediscovered West Coast Swing. He started taking
lessons from Robert Royston and hasn't looked back.
After a
couple of years of serious dancing, Robert perceived
that many of the dancers around him took the vitality of
dance for granted. They thought that the use of Swing
in a Gap ad was a sign that dance would always be
strong. By contrast, he felt that the main competition
to dance was the TV, a form of entertainment that
requires minimal skill, effort or expense. He also felt
that many people who practiced each type of dance often
didn't talk to each other, further weakening dance's
potential. As a post-doc at UC-Santa Cruz, he had been
working on educational websites.
He
decided it would be good to have a space in which people
from different styles of dance could come together. The
result was
www.ExploreDance.com. The site started out just
covering social dance, but has since expanded to cover
performance dance as well. Robert was recently
appointed to the board of the Dance Critics Association,
showing that dance's boundaries can be crossed.
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