Grier Cooper's Blog, page 13

Dance At Lunch Hour?

photo by Grier Cooper

Somewhere within the last five years, after decades of dance classes, something snapped. I longed to move without having to count every beat while remembering what was supposed to come next.I was tired of following other peoples’ choreography. I needed freedom from that cage

I needed a change.

I stumbled on the answer in a very serendipitous way, by following a friend to a 5Rhythms event bright and early one Sunday morning. And I do mean early–the doors opened at 8am. While...

Feast For The Senses Part II:Music That Makes You Move

Music is to dancers as oxygen is to the rest of us; a vital part of existence that we simply can’t do without. It’s the driving force for all dancers and creators of dance. But there’s music and there’s music. I’m thinking more about the type of music that touches us at our very core, elicits a burning, a yearning, a desire to translate what we are hearing into movement.

In short, the music that makes us want to step, sway, shimmy, shake something. Anything.

Because I was trained as a classical...

Feast For the Senses: A Visual Dance Feast

Most of us are busy getting ready for the Thanksgiving holiday. Maybe you’re one of those people braving the rabid masses at Trader Joe’s or you were one of the smart people who planned ahead and shopped before things started getting manic.

Maybe you’re just looking forward to having a few days off and wearing your pajamas more than you ought to.

However you define Thanksgiving it is meant to be a celebratory holiday, where we give thanks for the blessings in our lives and feast with loved ones...

Learning a New Dance

photo by Marcello Gambetti

When I was a young dancer at the School of American Ballet, I would often talk myself out trying difficult things before I even got started. A teacher would show a complicated turning combination or we’d have some crazy new throw in partnering class and I’d freak out. Quietly. On the inside. My fears far outweighed the slender shreds of optimism I might have had and kept me paralyzed. It was a response pattern that held me back from achieving more.

For most of us this...

For Everyone Who Loves Tutus: They’re Not Just For the Stage

[image error]

By Photograph by northbaywanderer, background removed by Editor at Large (Original image posted to Flickr as Ballet Shoes) [CC-BY-SA-2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/b...)], via Wikimedia Commons

This morning as I was driving my daughter to school we passed two high school girls in full costume– green and blue tutus, flower garlands, and face paint. My daughter was mesmerized. “How old do you think those girls are?” she asked. “I want a tutu like that.”

Don’t we all?

The good news i...

Can Ballet Save the Environment?

Spring Benefit Show by Jay Erker

I recently had the good fortune to learn about Ballerinas For The Environment (BFE). Here is an interview with founderCinthia Conlon.

1. What prompted you to start BFE?

I love ballet, I love natural sciences, and I felt the need to forge a career path that would allow me to pursue both. I was in my late teens when I learned my hips would prevent me from having a long-term career as a professional ballerina, so choosing a university route seemed to be the next log...

Dancing With Chaos

The past several months have marked an extremely chaotic time in my life, a time when I have felt in danger of being swept away by tremendous waves of sadness, disappointment and anxiety. It has not been a comfortable time. But through it all I have learned to ask myself the right questions, to look upon these experiences as opportunities for growth and to learn what I need to learn from them so that I can continue to grow and evolve as a human being.

Some of the questions I’ve been pondering...

See you in September!

It’s finally acting like summer in Northern California so I am taking some vacation time. See you in September!

In Which Vacation is Over

Today is our final day of vacation, a bittersweet time alive with opposing forces: the pull to return home and settle into the familiar and comfortable battles the desire to make the most of the remaining precious hours where we are, visiting with family.

We are at the beach, where we have spent much of our vacation, beginning in Key West and ending in Cape Cod, logging in more hours wet than dry, now dangerously close to sprouting webbed toes.

Summer is a time of impossibly long, luxurious, su...

In Which We Take an Epic Road Trip and Discover New Ballet Companies to Love

This summer we decided to take a road trip. It wasn’t going to be just any road trip; we planned to cover the entire Eastern seaboard, beginning at the Southern-most point in the US (in Key West, FL) and ending up in Maine. In a convertible Mustang. With a ten-year-old.

Did I mention we had 11 days to do it? That’s a lot of mileage to cover, with so much to see and do in between. While some may argue that this sounds like a recipe for disaster, we were either optimistically ignorant or just pl...