Beautiful dancers, I am so excited to announce my first offering of Basic Lyrical Jazz!
Friends from college will remember me as a lyrical jazz dancer, not a ballet dancer (did I tell you I used to run out of ballet classes with tears in my eyes because I felt so discouraged? lol...no? okay, forget I said anything - I love ballet!)
The thing is, as much as I truly do love ballet - and honestly, it is a challenging yet beautiful art form that I take tremendous joy in teaching - I have missed lyrical jazz.
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| No, we will not do floor work in my class. |
Note: please do not confuse "lyrical jazz" with "lyrical" or "contemporary," whatever the heck those latter two things are supposed to be. The words lyrical and contemporary are modifiers, not nouns. You would be correct to ask someone, "Contemporary what? Art? Music? Furniture?"
Back in my day - lo, these many decades ago - which is, ahem, the 80s, my jazz classes danced to music by Annie Lennox, Art of Noise, Wham! and everything you've ever heard on a John Hughes movie soundtrack. The movement was a nod to ballet but also jazz and modern dance. Pirouettes were in parallel and traveling steps included very wide balances which we called step, ball, change. We wore flared jazz pants or unitards, Oxford style jazz shoes and little socks or tights, and of course, leg warmers and matching head bands.
It was fun. F. U. N. FUN!
The competition crowd has taken lyrical jazz and turned it into an acrobatic kind of thing with dancers expressing overwrought emotions and miming the lyrics to the songs. When I taught teens, I would see them singing along to songs in their classes or, worse, I would see their teachers teaching movement to the words in the lyrics. What the heck? No, just no. Maybe if you were on Broadway doing "Chicago" or something.
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| Not Fosse. |
When you take Basic Lyrical Jazz with me, you will get a 20 minute warmup, 20 minutes of turns and traveling steps and then 20 minutes of choreography to a fun piece of music. It will feel like casual ballet, gooey modern, and expansive jazz. Add it all up and you get lyrical jazz.
Come try it out: Wednesdays, 8-9PM PST, at Inspire Dance Studio (or on Zoom if you are so inclined).
BONUS: Take both the Wednesday Beginner Ballet from 6:30-8PM first and get $5 off when you also sign up for the jazz class on the same night. Just purchase the ballet class first and then you'll get the code to apply to the jazz class.
Starts April 6!
