Gotta Ballroom

An instruction and technique quide for learning to dance the American style waltz, tango, foxtrot and Viennese waltz.

Click here to listen to Julia Ericksen's interview about Dance with Me on Philadelphia NPR's "Radio Times" Rumba music starts and a floor full of dancers alternate clinging to one another and turning away. Rumba is an erotic dance, and the mood is hot and heavy; the women bend and hyperextend their legs as they twist and turn around their partners. Amateur and professional ballroom dancers alike compete in a highly gendered display of intimacy, romance and sexual passion. In Dance With Me, Julia Ericksen, a competitive ballroom dancer herself, takes the reader onto the competition floor and into the lights and the glamour of a world of tanned bodies and glittering attire, exploring the allure of this hyper-competitive, difficult, and often expensive activity. In a vivid ethnography accompanied by beautiful photographs of all levels of dancers, from the world’s top competitors to social dancers, Ericksen examines the ways emotional labor is used to create intimacy between professional partners and between professionals and their students, illustrating how dancers purchase intimacy. She shows that, while at first glance, ballroom presents a highly gendered face with men leading and women following, dancing also transgresses gender.

Nick Bauble, barber and dentist, is an insatiable slum Don Juan. One girlfriend, Mimi, is not enough for him. He also wants, and gets, Didina. But this skirt chasing doesn’t come without quite a few problems. One problem is that both Mimi and Didina already have their steady sugar daddies in their lives. Another, bigger problem is that Didina’s steady man Jessop Panache is a violent man, who is now searching for Nick to... fix his wagon... And last, but not least, Mimi is a super-jealous lover and a revolutionary to boot, and has decided to pay Nick back for his infidelity by throwing a bottle of acid into his face. And on top of it all, the carnival is coming, and all the characters above will put on their masks and their costumes and dance the night away ... Will our romantic barber find a way out of this labyrinth of problems? Leave it to the great puppet master, Ion Luca Caragiale, to weave a head-spinning web of intrigue...

In the 1940s and ’50s Spade Cooley, the King of Western Swing, played to sellout crowds at the Santa Monica Ballroom. He charmed audiences with his fine fiddling, self-deprecating manner, and bounce-all-over-the-stage exuberance. Adapting his ballroom show for live television, The Spade Cooley Show, began broadcasting in 1948 and made Cooley the top local television entertainer for several years. He married one of his band singers, Ella Mae Evans. Their fifteen-year marriage was plagued with Cooley’s drunk and jealous rage and ended with Cooley beating his wife to death. The front-page trial ended with Cooley’s conviction.

Armed with an eighth-grade education, an inexhaustible imagination, and an innate talent for dancing, Hermes Pan (1909-1990) was a boy from Tennessee who became the most prolific, popular, and memorable choreographer of the glory days of the Hollywood musical. While he may be most well-known for the Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers musicals which he choreographed at RKO film studios, he also created dances at Twentieth Century-Fox, M-G-M, Paramount, and later for television, winning both the Oscar and the Emmy for best choreography. In Hermes Pan: The Man Who Danced with Fred Astaire, Pan emerges as a man in full, an artist inseparable from his works. He was a choreographer deeply interested in his dancers' personalities, and his dances became his way of embracing and understanding the outside world. Though his time in a Trappist monastery proved to him that he was more suited to choreography than to life as a monk, Pan remained a deeply devout Roman Catholic throughout his creative life, a person firmly convinced of the powers of prayer. While he was rarely to be seen without several beautiful women at his side, it was no secret that Pan was homosexual and even had a life partner. As Pan worked at the nexus of the cinema industry's creative circles during the golden age of the film musical, this book traces not only Pan's personal life but also the history of the Hollywood musical itself. It is a study of Pan, who emerges here as a benevolent perfectionist, and equally of the stars, composers, and directors with whom he worked, from Astaire and Rogers to Betty Grable, Rita Hayworth, Elizabeth Taylor, Sammy Davis Jr., Frank Sinatra, Bob Fosse, George Gershwin, Samuel Goldwyn, and countless other luminaries of American popular entertainment. Author John Franceschina bases his telling of Pan's life on extensive first-hand research into Pan's unpublished correspondence and his own interviews. Pan enjoyed one of the most illustrious careers of any Hollywood dance director, and because his work also spanned across Broadway and television, this book will appeal to readers interested in musical theater history, dance history, and film.

Discovering Dance is the ideal introductory text for students with little to no dance experience. Teachers can adapt this course to meet students where they are, whether they are new to dance or already have some dance experience. The material helps students consider where movement comes from and why humans are compelled to move, grasp the foundational concepts of dance, and explore movement activities from the perspectives of a dancer, a choreographer, and an observer. The result is a well-rounded educational experience for students to build on, whether they want to further explore dance or choreography or otherwise factor dance into college or career goals. Discovering Dance will help students in these ways: • Meet national and state standards in dance education and learn from a pedagogically sound scope and sequence that allow them to address 21st-century learning goals. • Discover dance through creating, performing, analyzing, understanding, responding to, connecting to, and evaluating dance and dance forms. • Step into a flexible dance curriculum that is appropriate for one or more years of instruction. • Build on their dance experience, whether they want to further explore dance or choreography or otherwise factor dance into college or career goals. • Use student web resources to enhance their learning. The book is divided into four parts and 16 chapters. Part I focuses on the foundational concepts of dance and art processes, wellness, safety, dance elements, and composition. Part II delves into societal facets of dance, including historical, social, folk, and cultural dance. In part III, students explore dance on stage, including ballet, modern dance, jazz dance, and tap dance, and also examine aspects of performance and production. Part IV rounds out the course by preparing students for dance in college or as a career and throughout life. Each chapter helps students • discover new dance genres; • explore dance genres through its history, artists, vocabulary, and significant works; • apply dance concepts through movement, written, oral, visual, technology, and multimedia assignments, thus deepening their knowledge and abilities; • enhance learning by completing in each chapter a portfolio assignment; and • use the Did You Know and Spotlight elements to expand on the chapter content and gain more insight into dance artists, companies, and events. Learning objectives, vocabulary terms, and an essential question at the beginning of each chapter prepare students for their learning experience. Students then move through the chapter, engaging in a variety of movement discovery, exploration, response, and research activities. The activities and assignments meet the needs of visual, auditory, and kinesthetic learners and help students explore dance through vocabulary, history, culture, creation, performance, and choreography. This personal discovery is greatly aided by technology—including learning experiences that require taking photos; watching or creating short videos of dancers’ performances; creating timelines, graphs, drawings, and diagrams; and creating soundscapes. Chapters conclude with a portfolio assignment or project and a chapter review quiz. A comprehensive glossary further facilitates learning. In addition, some chapters contain Explore More elements, which trigger students to investigate selected dance styles on the web resource. These sections offer students insight into various dance genres and styles; for example, in the chapter on cultural dance, students can explore more about street dances, Mexican folkloric dance, African dance, Indian dance, and Japanese dance. The online components further strengthen the book and enrich the students’ learning experience. These resources also help teachers to prepare for and manage their classes. Here is an overview of the resources: Teacher Web Resource • Learning objectives • Extended learning activities • Handouts and assignments that students can complete, save, and print to turn in • Explore More sections of selected chapters to introduce students to additional social, folk, cultural, and contemporary dance styles • Chapter glossary terms both with and without the definitions • Chapter PowerPoint presentations • Information on assessment tools • Interactive chapter review quizzes • Answer keys for handouts, assignment sheets, and quizzes • Unit exams and answer sheets • Video and audio clips for selected dance genres • Web links and web search terms for resources to enhance the learning • Additional teacher resources to support and extend the teaching and learning process (these resources include chapter learning objectives, enduring understanding and essential questions, chapter quotes, teacher-directed information to support teaching specific activities, and web links) Student Web Resource • Handouts and assignments that students can complete, save, and print to turn in • Explore More sections of selected chapters to introduce students to additional social, folk, cultural, and contemporary dance styles • Chapter glossary terms both with and without the definitions so students can test their knowledge • Information on assessment tools • Interactive chapter review quizzes • Video and audio clips for selected dance genres • Web links and web search terms for resources to enhance the learning

From the bestselling author of The Tavern on Maple Street, comes a novel of romance and regret—and the winding paths to love. Johnny Hogan was born and bred on Hollywood movies. He loved the ice-cool matinee idols, the swooning dames, and the possibility that it could all come true. That’s why he opened the ballroom on Magnolia Street. To bring that weekend fantasy to life—for himself, for devoted romantics like his dear grandparents, for the sake of Johnny’s never-forgotten, long-lost lover, and for women like Kate and Shirley Winters, two sisters both looking for fulfill their own passionate fantasies. For everyone in town who still believes in impossible dreams. Come Saturday night, the ballroom on Magnolia Street could be just the place for it all to come true amid the twinkling lights and soft music—a special crossroads for friendships, for family, for people in love.

Based on the true story of a corporate deal gone bad and the internal investigation that exposed a shocking online fraud. For SouthPoint Bank, its purchase of Internet Connections, or ICon, was a risky way to boost its stock price, and the deal was rushed so that the Chairman of SouthPoint could stay in power. For ICon, being acquired by SouthPoint was its last chance to cash in on the Internet boom, but the President of ICon was looking for more than money - he needed a way to escape a secret that ICon had been concealing through a conspiracy of fraud. After an insider's tip, SouthPoint launched a surprise internal investigation of ICon. When the investigators found a connection between ICon and the Russian Mafia, the investigation suddenly turned into a dangerous race against the clock to expose the fraud and to save SouthPoint from financial ruin. From Andorra in the Pyrenees Mountains to Antigua in the Caribbean Sea, Fraudulent Intention$ twists and turns around the shadowy world of online adult entertainment.