Category Archives: Shall We Dance Friday

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8/7/15 O&A Shall We Dance Friday: Michael Jackson – Smooth Criminal

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Shall We Dance

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Smooth Criminal is the seventh single from Michael Jackson’s 1987 Bad album. Jackson originally wanted to make the music video in the western genre, but he later decided after watching “The Third Man” with Director Colin Chilvers to change it to a 1930s gangster style. Jeffrey Daniel of the soul music group Shalamar co-choreographed the Smooth Criminal video with Jackson and Vincent Paterson, who was a back-up dancer in Beat It and Thriller.

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The dance sequence of the video in the 1930s style lounge (and Jackson’s white suit and fedora) pays tribute to the Fred Astaire musical comedy film The Band Wagon. Jackson and some of the dancers around him perform a seemingly impossible forward lean. For the video, this was done using harness cables. To accomplish this maneuver for stage performances, though, Jackson co-patented a hitching mechanism which was built into the floor of the stage and the performer’s shoes.

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Michael Jackson – Smooth Criminal

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7/31/15 O&A Shall We Dance Friday: Beat Street Roxy Battle

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Shall We Dance

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Beat Street (1984) is a  film featuring New York City hip hop culture of the early 1980s; breakdancing, DJing, and graffiti were front and center. Set in the South Bronx, the film follows the lives of a pair of brothers and their friends, all of whom are devoted to various elements of early hip hop culture.  Many of the internal dance sequences were filmed at the Roxy, a popular nightclub/disco located in the Chelsea section of Manhattan. Continue reading

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7/24/15 0&A Shall We Dance Friday: Bessie Schönberg- How to Look at Dance

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Shall We Dance

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Bessie Schönberg (1906-1997) a distinguished and beloved educator in the dance arts,  speaks to a class of interns at Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival in the summer of 1989. She discusses the art and technique of how one can watch dance as an audience member. Schönberg offers insight into how one can prepare oneself to view new dance, find an entry point or “handle-bar” into the content, and how to build an appetite for the multitude of dance forms. Continue reading

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7/3/15 O&A Shall We Dance Friday: The Lake section of Alvin Ailey’s The River- American Ballet Theater with Cynthia Gregory and Marcos Paredes

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The Lake section of Alvin Ailey’s The River featuring music by Duke Ellington, with American Ballet Theater Cynthia Gregory and Marcos Paredes.  The ballet was first performed by American Ballet Theater (ABT) on June 25, 1970 to highly enthusiastic reviews. Continue reading

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6/26/15 O&A Shall We Dance Friday: Monotones II- Frederick Ashton

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Shall We Dance

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In Monotones II Frederick Ashton distilled the exquisite tranquility of Erik Satie’s Trois Gymnopédies. Ashton displayed some of his most modernist choreography danced by the Royal Ballet. Monotones II was created first and given its premiere at the Royal Opera House on March 24, 1965 with Vyvyan Lorraine, Anthony Dowell, and Robert Mead. Satie’s delicate music, coupled with Ashton’s beautiful choreography, is wonderfully haunting.
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9/22/17 O&A Shall We Dance: Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers – Top Hat

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Shall We Dance

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Top Hat was the most successful picture of Astaire and Rogers’ partnership (and Astaire’s second most successful picture after Easter Parade), achieving second place in worldwide box-office receipts for 1935. While some dance critics maintain that Swing Time contained a finer set of dances, Top Hat remains, to this day, the partnership’s best-known work. Continue reading

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Litefeet: Sound of the Subway’ Is a Documentary on New York’s Underground Music and Dance

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Shall We Dance

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Litefeet is a rising music genre and style of dance that has become increasingly popular within the New York subway scene.  The genre is highlighted by 100-BPM tracks as well as an acrobatic take on old school b-boy moves and pop-locking. Due to the energetic nature of the music and the moves, police have begun cracking down on the scene, leaving artists sometimes struggling to cope. Continue reading

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6/5/15 O&A Shall We Dance- A Tribute To Dudley Williams: A Song For You (1986)

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In 1972, Alvin Ailey created the elegiac solo Love Songs for dancer Dudley Williams. The  sixteen minute solo, composed in three sections includes A Song for You by Donny Hathaway; Poppies by Nina Simone; and He Ain’t Heavy, He’s my Brother by Donny Hathaway. Many  thought of the work as the male equivalent of the female solo Cry (1971). Continue reading

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5/28/2015 Shall We Dance Friday: NextLevel Squad

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Shall We Dance

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Next Level Squad, a Brooklyn-based group of élite dancers who specialize in Bone Breaking.  The dance style has roots, as a technique, in flexing; but in recent years it has flourished as its own distinct dance form. Next Level Squad has not only brought Bone Breaking to the attention of the urban public, it has gained an international following. Another art-form “Made In America”. Continue reading