Gotta Ballroom - Christine Zona and Chris George

Gotta Ballroom

by Christine Zona and Chris George

NEW, 224 pages plus DVD

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About Gotta Ballroom

Gotta Ballroom is your guide to dancing the waltz, tango, foxtrot, and Viennese waltz. Master instructors and professional dancers Christine Zona and Chris George describe and demonstrate every movement, providing you with the skills you need to glide across the dance floor like a pro. 

Including a 64-minute DVD, Gotta Ballroom provides specific instruction for social success with the four most popular American style ballroom dances. This one-of-a-kind package breaks down both leader and follower roles to show basic footwork, body positioning, timing, styling, transitions. 

With an interactive and structured approach, Gotta Ballroom will soon have you spontaneously moving with a partner and with the music. It provides the tools you will use every day (and night) as you immerse yourself in the experience, pleasure, and grace of American style ballroom dance.

About Christine Zona

Christine Zona is a former ballroom studio owner and competitor. She has danced professionally in the international standard and Latin divisions and in the American ballroom division and won several Rising Star titles. She is a certified teacher and adjudicator in American ballroom and rhythm, international standard and Latin, and theatre arts divisions and is a member of many professional dance organizations. Currently, she judges ballroom dance competitions, instructs dancers of all ages, and is the editor of Dance Notes, a national bimonthly publication devoted to ballroom dance. Zona resides in New York City.

About Chris George

Chris George is a professional ballroom dancer, teacher, and former competitor. He has competed in the American ballroom and rhythm divisions, winning a number of Rising Star titles. He is a former coeditor of Dance Notes and now serves as a contributing editor. Currently pursuing a career on stage as an actor, singer, and dancer, he has danced at the internationally renowned Moulin Rouge in Paris and performed on two national tours of the Broadway shows Kiss Me, Kate and The Full Monty. George resides in New York City.

Reviews

“The advice to newcomers of ballroom dancing is both comprehensive and helpful. A good read for experts and beginners alike."

Peter Pover
Director of External Affairs for USA Dance 

About Dance

Dance is an art form that generally refers to movement of the body, usually rhythmic and to music, used as a form of expression, social interaction or presented in a spiritual or performance setting.

Dance may also be regarded as a form of nonverbal communication between humans, and is also performed by other animals (bee dance, patterns of behaviour such as a mating dance). Gymnastics, figure skating and synchronized swimming are sports that incorporate dance, while martial arts kata are often compared to dances. Motion in ordinarily inanimate objects may also be described as dances (the leaves danced in the wind).

Definitions of what constitutes dance are dependent on social, cultural, aesthetic, artistic and moral constraints and range from functional movement (such as folk dance) to virtuoso techniques such as ballet. Dance can be participatory, social or performed for an audience. It can also be ceremonial, competitive or erotic. Dance movements may be without significance in themselves, such as in ballet or European folk dance, or have a gestural vocabulary/symbolic system as in many Asian dances. Dance can embody or express ideas, emotions or tell a story.

Dancing has evolved many styles. Breakdancing and Krumping are related to the hip hop culture. African dance is interpretative. Ballet, Ballroom, Waltz, and Tango are classical styles of dance while Square and the Electric Slide are forms of step dances.

Every dance, no matter what style, has something in common. It not only involves flexibility and body movement, but also physics. If the proper physics is not taken into consideration, injuries may occur.

Choreography is the art of creating dances. The person who creates (i.e., choreographs) a dance is known as the choreographer.

Dance does not leave behind clearly identifiable physical artifacts such as stone tools, hunting implements or cave paintings. It is not possible to say when dance became part of human culture. Dance has certainly been an important part of ceremony, rituals, celebrations and entertainment since before the birth of the earliest human civilizations. Archeology delivers traces of dance from prehistoric times such as the 9,000 year old Rock Shelters of Bhimbetka paintings in India and Egyptian tomb paintings depicting dancing figures from c. 3300 BC.

One of the earliest structured uses of dances may have been in the performance and in the telling of myths. It was also sometimes used to show feelings for one of the opposite gender. It is also linked to the origin of "love making." Before the production of written languages, dance was one of the methods of passing these stories down from generation to generation.

Another early use of dance may have been as a precursor to ecstatic trance states in healing rituals. Dance is still used for this purpose by many cultures from the Brazilian rainforest to the Kalahari Desert.

Sri Lankan dances goes back to the mythological times of aboriginal yingyang twins and "yakkas" (devils). According to a Sinhalese legend, Kandyan dances originate, 250 years ago, from a magic ritual that broke the spell on a bewitched king. Many contemporary dance forms can be traced back to historical, traditional, ceremonial, and ethnic dance.

Gotta Ballroom