Apparently, I am some kind of shape shifter…I change clothes and people suddenly don’t recognize me. I change my hair—curly to straight-ish and pulled back—I’m a new person. Then add some make-up, or better yet, glasses, and forget it. Clark [...]
Ten years ago, I was working through a relatively serious injury as a dancer—a stress fracture in L4 on the left side (my fourth lumbar vertebrae, lower back). I think it’s pretty common for dancers to encounter a serious injury [...]
So I moved to Ohio. Not to one of the major cities here…I moved just north of Amish Country—to Oberlin, Ohio. There are horse & buggy parking spots at the Wal-Mart down the road. Endless cornfields—so many cornfields! With [...]
I often find myself frustrated by flamenco dance being treated as secondary, or just “lesser” than ballet and contemporary dance, as something not to be taken seriously. I think there are many reasons for that, some deeply rooted in [...]
"What the world needs now is dance." With a provocative title such as that, I was pretty excited to read the article on Dance Magazine's online content page. Anyone who knows me, knows I believe if we're ever going to [...]
Here are some basic leadership lessons I am slowly but surely learning the hard way, and go figure, they are all connected. I am not exactly a natural leader. I step in to leadership roles if need be, but it's [...]
The most "flamenco" experiences I've had outside of Spain were not flamenco at all. One was a break dance battle at Wayne State University in Detroit and the other was a jazz concert in Albuquerque at the African American Performing [...]
Someone said to me the other day: why don’t you rent studio space at X studio and teach classes there, you know the owner is very collaborative. Wait, what? What does collaboration have to do with where I rent studio [...]
Here are two words I am absolutely sick and tired of hearing, mostly because they are misused: community and collaboration. This blog post will address the first one, and the latter will be addressed in a future blog post. Let’s [...]
Radical ideas that shouldn't be radical (in flamenco more specifically, but in other dance forms too): 1) holding auditions 2) letting dancers wear their natural hair (i.e. not slicked back) 2.5) letting dancers be individuals 3) not choosing dancers based [...]
