An Irish Tradition With an Only-in-America Star (NY Times)
March 17, 2012
Meet Drew Lovejoy, a 17-year-old from rural Ohio. His background could not be more American. His father is black and Baptist from Georgia and his mother is white and Jewish from Iowa. But his fame is international after winning the all-Ireland dancing championship in Dublin for a third straight year.
in 2010, when he became the first person of color to win the world championship for Irish dancing — the highest honor in that small and close-knit world — and a group of male dancers in their 70s, all of them Irish, offered their congratulations.
"You have two lives — the Irish dance world and the real world where you live every day,” Ms. Goldberg said. In the world of dance, “you found a place where you’re comfortable and people don’t look at you in a certain way.”
Erik says: Dance has an amazing way of transcending racial stereotypes, economics and nationalities. This story is exemplary of the power of music and dance to bond people of different backgrounds and make people more sympathetic to each other.
The Physicist Who Figured Out Ballet (discovermagazine.com)
September 11, 2008
Ken Laws is a professor emeritus of physics at Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. He also has a very serious case of balletomania. When his daughter and son decided to take ballet classes as children, so did he. After his children stopped taking ballet, Laws continued for another three decades.
Early on, frustrated with instructions from his teachers that he considered impressionistic, Laws started applying his knowledge of physics to jetés, fouettés, and other balletic motion. Conservation of angular momentum is perhaps the most important physical principle in ballet, but there’s more to ballet than rotation.
Now on a different stage, applause of a different kind (Real Estate Weekly)
March 27, 2013
In reflection, Novoa says while the stage and the applause may be different, some of the techniques she had to employ as a dancer so long ago, have remained the same. To work in the real estate business like dancing on the stage, requires a supreme amount of concentration in order to succeed, she said.
Erik says: Perhaps I'm biased about this article because it's about my mom, but I truely believe that dance gives a strong sense of consentration. Maybe the deep and complex synaptic connections that are made as a dancer can help us in our business environments.
Couple handcuffed, jailed for dancing on subway platform (NY Post)
It was nearly midnight when Stern and Hess, a film-industry prop master, headed home last July from Jazz at Lincoln Center’s Midsummer Night’s Swing. As they waited for the train, a musician started playing steel drums on the nearly empty platform and Stern and Hess began to feel the beat.
The cops asked for ID, but when Stern could only produce a credit card, the officers ordered the couple to go with them — even though the credit card had the dentist’s picture and signature.
When Hess began trying to film the encounter, things got ugly, Stern said.
“We brought out the camera, and that’s when they called backup,” she said. “That’s when eight ninja cops came from out of nowhere.”
Hess was allegedly tackled to the platform floor, and cuffs were slapped on both of them. The initial charge, according to Stern, was disorderly conduct for “impeding the flow of traffic.”
Use It or Lose It - Dancing Makes You Smarter
For centuries, dance manuals and other writings have lauded the health benefits of dancing, usually as physical exercise. More recently we've seen research on further health benefits of dancing, such as stress reduction and increased serotonin level, with its sense of well-being.
Then most recently we've heard of another benefit: Frequent dancing apparently makes us smarter. A major study added to the growing evidence that stimulating one's mind can ward off Alzheimer's disease and other dementia, much as physical exercise can keep the body fit. Dancing also increases cognitive acuity at all ages.
How Theater for Young People Could Save the World (Huffington Post)
Around the world artists are creating a new stripe of Theatre for Young People that combines the elegance of dance, the innovation of devised theater, the freshness of new plays, the magnetism of puppetry and the inciting energy of new musicals.
...theater is like a gym for empathy. It's where we can go to build up the muscles of compassion, to practice listening and understanding and engaging with people that are not just like ourselves. We practice sitting down, paying attention and learning from other people's actions. We practice caring.
Ballet Fans Truly Know How to Feel the Moves
Scientists report that the ballet/dance spectators showed muscle-specific responses in their brain as if they were expert dancers — even though “they were clearly not capable of doing the actual movements,”
Dancers on the poverty line (Crains)
The average professional dancer in New York City earns only $28,000 a year, according to a study to be released Monday by Dance NYC. The amount is just above the nation's poverty line. Of that income, just 55% comes from dance jobs, on average.
Could Beyoncé Get in Trouble for Stealing Dance Moves? (Slate)
Is it really possible to steal a dance? Evidence surfaced on Monday that Beyoncé may have cribbed dance moves from a Belgian choreographer, Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker, for her new music video “Countdown.” Certain scenes in the video do appear almost identical to a 1997 film version of de Keersmaeker’s 1983 work “Rosas danst Rosas,” both in terms of movement and design.
Dance games step into void left by other genres (USAToday)
When interest in music games such as Guitar Hero and Rock Band declined, developers simply sidestepped and took a spin at making dance games.
Ballet replaces drugs for Fallen Angels dancers (BBC News)
Fallen Angels Dance Theatre was created to help vulnerable young people and adults who have experienced drug addiction and alcoholism through dance.
