|
Social Dance - Steps to Success - Judy Patterson Wright
Social Dance - Steps to Success
by Judy Wright
NEW, 240 pages plus CD
Get other Dance books here
About Social Dance - Steps to Success
Move with grace and feel confident on the dance floor—step by step! Social Dance: Steps to Success will teach you all the moves for eight popular dance styles:
- Swing
- Cha-cha
- Foxtrot
- Polka
- Waltz
- Rumba
- Tango
- Salsa/mambo
Each step in the progression teaches you a new skill, then builds on those skills to develop creative dance routines. The first few steps provide a solid foundation of the basics to help you understand alignment, musical structure, and footwork synchronization with the music. As you progress, you will also learn how to lead and follow, move from one dance position to another, combine dance variations into sequences, and much more.
Every step also explains why the concept or skill is important, identifies the keys to correct technique, helps you avoid common errors, and explains how to practice each skill.
Written by master teacher and dancer Judy Patterson Wright, this book is part of the Steps to Success Series—the most extensively researched and carefully developed set of sport skill instruction books ever published.
Includes music CD!
To help you practice, a compact disc is included that provides 19 tracks for training and practice. The first 8 are training examples (some with voice overs) for identifying the beat, measures, and highlighting general characteristics of selected social dance music. Tracks 9 through 19 include instrumental practice music (average 2 minutes each) for all 8 dances covered in the book.
About Judy Wright
Judy Patterson Wright, PhD, is an accomplished dancer who has taught social dance at the junior high, high school, and college levels since 1971. Dr. Wright's dance experience includes a wide variety of styles: ballroom and social dance, tap dance, jazz, modern dance, ballet, folk dance, square dance, country western dance, line dance, and aerobic dancercise.
She has been recognized as one of the Outstanding Young Women of America (1982) and repeatedly as an Excellent Teacher at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She has judged and competed in dance competitions, and she specializes in progressive teaching workshops both for social and competitive dancers. Judy and her husband, Sam, placed second overall in the Silver Advanced Showcase Division at the World finals in 1996 and 1997. They are the 1997 World Silver Advanced Showcase cha-cha Champions.
Dr. Wright, currently an acquisitions editor, is the creator of the format for the Steps to Success Activity Series and the author of the companion title Social Dance Instruction: Steps to Success. She resides in Mahomet, Illinois.
Reviews
"Wright provides a thorough, step-by-step approach in instructing prospective Freds and Gingers in body alignment and carriage, music recognition, brief dance histories, and basic and variant footwork. . . . Appropriate for school or public libraries with a demand for recreational dance methods."
Library Journal
"Social Dance: Steps to Success is a real contribution to students and teachers who are involved in ballroom dance training. The systematic teaching outlined in this book has drills to emphasize basic technique. The illustrations and specific success goals are well outlined."
William J. Bennett
Ballroom dance consultant
Member, board of directors, United States Ballroom Dancers Association
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.
Social Dance - Steps to Success
|
