We always have a really bad dancer on ‘Strictly,’ like Kate Garraway or Fiona Phillips, and that’s great, and we love it, but when it comes to the quarters and semis, you want the best dancers left in.
I started salsa dancing with a few different companies and started touring the country. It was fantastic, but I realized that I really wanted to talk every time we were performing. That’s a problem because when you’re dancing, if you stop to talk, that’s not really cool to the other dancers.
So many dancers paint. I used to paint. I started again recently. While I was dancing, I was very busy with my career. Start something else that makes use of your creative ability because if you don’t you will die inside as a person.
Backup dancers are completely respectable. They’re the studio musicians of dance.
For an actor, one doesn’t have to be a dancer. But because our Hindi movies have so many song and dance sequences, it is preferred if they are good dancers. It’s always advantageous to know dance. But if you don’t, it’s okay.
I was one of those dancers who they say wants to feel the floor through their pointe shoes. I would end up not wearing toe pads and that stuff. I would just wrap minimal amounts of paper towels around my toes.
Dancers, like all performing artists, like nothing better than to be challenged.
When I started off with ‘Dance India Dance,’ even the TV show people thought it won’t be accepted. But with the talent that the show received, I was able to personally tutor dancers to amalgamate contemporary dance moves on Bollywood tracks.
I was using tape loops for dancers and dance production. I had very funky primitive equipment, in fact technology wasn’t very good no matter how much money you had.
My parents were both in show business. My father was an actor, my mom an actress, and both singers, dancers and actors. They met in Los Angeles doing a play together and so I grew up in a show biz family.
Ideally if I settled down with a wife I would love to form my own troupe of mini dancers!
I wanna get backup singers, but I don’t think I will ever get backup dancers.
With my work, it’s not possible to just cast a production and leave it. I have to nurture the group of dancers to make it happen.
Most men, even egotistic actors, always shy away from dancing with me. Other dancers report the same trouble. They probably figure that I would be mentally comparing them with Fred Astaire or Gene Kelly. So I go to parties and usually just sit – unless George Burns is there – and then I have a ball.
I’ve had a lot of little girls write to me saying that they want to be dancers and that I’ve inspired them.
There are a lot of artists that I love, and I think they’re really talented, and they’re good dancers as well. I’ve always wished that I could combine that.
I know certain pro dancers would like to dance with a woman because that is what tradition is, and it kind of makes sense but it is very much down to someone’s personal opinion of what Ballroom and Latin dancing actually is.
For 20 years, I’ve been running an institute in Chennai where serious dancers from Kerala come with aspirations of becoming professional dancers.
Unless the clients want, I don’t like to have dancers for my shows. I prefer a rock show look and like performing with a live band.
Ballet is a healthy world despite what people might think. There’s a perception that ballet dancers are skinny and unhealthy, but that’s rubbish. You have to be strong, so eating regularly and healthily is essential.
Coming out in a bedazzled tank top and silver jeans and singing ‘Superstar’ with a 36-piece band and 28 dancers around me is one of the dopest things I’ve ever had the opportunity to do.
Dancers are working their bodies just like a marathon runner would, and you have to eat to make it through a three-hour performance. Dancers put their bodies through incredible strain.
Don’t get me wrong: I love a massive show with dancers and the works, and I love Zumba! But I just want there to be more people who just sing.
Do I watch dancers as people? Yes, absolutely. Do I watch really good dancers for specifically who they are? Absolutely, because how they move best and how they look best is going to be most familiar to them, and not necessarily to me.
It’s expensive to get studio space and dancers. My whole first three years, I was sneaking around in the studios and getting kicked out of them. It was kind of depressing.
The great thing about being the son of Maya Angelou is that I had the good fortune to grow up around some of the greatest black artists, dancers, singers, musicians, and actors of our time.
‘ABCD’ is an out-and-out dance film. I also dance in the film. I must say you would see better dancers than me in this film. It was very tough for me to match their steps.
Most dancers have a young body. This is part discipline and part desire, because just sitting around makes one feel sluggish.
Being in the wardrobe department meant me and a few other girls dressed the dancers during the show when they had quick changes. Thirty seconds to totally dress a sweaty dancer can be insane and provoke mucho anxiety. Doing this night after night was pretty cray, but I loved every minute of it.
‘Eclipse’ is a concept piece, and its concept centers on 36 large light bulbs strung from above in a geometrical pattern and at different heights, some of them at times down below the dancers’ chest level.
Somewhere along the line, a concert became a variety show. It was no longer enough for four dudes to play together in front of some guitar amps. Costume changes, an army of dancers, and Broadway theatrics suddenly became standard for a ‘concert.’
Those 25 dancers we worked with for a day, in as highly productive a way as possible – a long class, a period of teaching bits of the repertory – in fact I didn’t teach Bank, I’ve used parts of Oil and Water.
I don’t like teaching, because it’s so repetitive – especially the beginning of class, which is always more or less the same and has to be carefully done. It’s tedious. But I know it’s necessary for dancers to keep working on technique.
I got extremely fit and slim on ‘Strictly,’ but I did find that, each week, a different part of my body hurt. It really makes you realise the hard work dancers have to put in and how fit they have to be.
How can you live the high life if you do not wear high heels? I don’t understand why women wear these ballet pumps. They are only good if you walk like a ballet dancer, and only ballet dancers do that.
When I first moved to New York, I wanted to be a dancer. I danced professionally for years, living a hand-to-mouth existence. I never tapped into nightlife; all I knew was dancers. We went to bed early and got up early and went to free concerts at the Lincoln Center and Shakespeare in the Park.
There are two ways of being creative. One can sing and dance. Or one can create an environment in which singers and dancers flourish.
Same with anyone who’s been flying for years and loves it still… we’re part of a world we deeply love. Just as musicians feel about scores and melodies, dancers about the steps and flow of music, so we’re one with the principle of flight, the magic of being aloft in the wind!
‘Empty Moves’ is elegantly and coolly inventive. Two pairs of dancers shadow each other in slow, deliberate rearrangements and manipulations of legs and torsos, only occasionally switching partners or breaking free of the formal patterning.
The human voice deployed to recite the Vedas and later aid the temple dancers was paramount before any instruments emerged.
I was seventeen when I moved to New York. I was nineteen when I joined the main company. I was going through a lot. Just becoming an adult and just wanting to fit in, be accepted, and be in common with the other dancers.
That’s a traditional Samoan dance. I was lucky that I was able to fly my cousins, who are professional dancers, up from Hawaii and they were able to be in the movie with me. We had a great time.
If I had to reflect on the finest classical male ballet dancers of my time, Vladimir Vasiliev of the Bolshoi and the Danish dancer Eric Bruhn were, I feel, without peer.
There’s something refreshing about going to work with a different group of dancers. There are different ways of moving, different ways in which the institution functions. There’s a contrast from place to place, so the variety and the experience of working in a different place feeds me.
Dancers are made, not born.
Music videos are notoriously long, not fun, grueling. You are known there as a dancer and it’s kind of sad because dancers, in a lot of ways, are under-appreciated and kind of under-respected when it come to that so they don’t necessarily treat you in a nice way when you do a music video.
I’m in show business, and we have a long history here of making movies about law enforcement officers. If you’re my age, and you’re male, and you’re trying to get work, you’re going to run into those roles as opposed to having a long run of playing dancers.
Dancers are always striving for perfection. A great dancer never achieves it: you always want to do another turn, a higher jump,a more difficult acrobatic jump.
That is perceptive of you, because in this country men dancers have always been viewed with suspicion. If you were an actor, a star, and a dancer, you had to be, or have a name like someone ‘mainstream.’
