marinamau what did you think of the Paso dancing in the film Strictly Ballroom? I know there is a fair bit of Flamenco in it, but you can clearly see Scot make moves that a matador would make.

But the Jill's music was proper Paso, though I get your meaning. They did a pretty great job. the choreo was good and her dancing was great too. My only problem is Darren as a dancer (not as choreographer as I think he is really great as such), he doesn't the oomph that I look for in the paso, he looks too much like a nice man but not enough of the killer instinct. I don't see in him the sexual tension, strength or power.

If you would like to know what i mean by sexual tension, inner strength and power, google Jose Maria Manzanares hijo or Cayetano Rivera Ordonez.

Buddy, that is imho one of the best paso in terms of being ballroom but capturing the emotion and the spanishness that I have seen.

It's one of my all time favourite films and I get goosebumps when they dance and when the slow clapping starts, it is just fantastic!

Me too. I am not sure why, but in recent years dance makes me more emotional than music. There is something amazing when all the elements come together in a dance.

Round 1, with 5 highest-voted dancers to go through into the Final on Christmas Day at midnight:

Ann Widdicombe - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Goc36SOdKIA

Salome ---------------- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q2zTy...7D756&index=32

Mata Hari ------------ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xQ5IKr0fyxw&feature=fvw

Alesha Dixon -------- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HB4MXF_So5w

Cleopatra ------------- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pJbz0rL7338

Jill Halfpenny ------- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XVxxG2AVOCQ

Fiona Phillips ------- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zMtmeVMKRNQ

Vaslav Nijinski ----- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qRlWU...eature=related

Isadora Duncan ----- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mKtQWU2ifOs

Kate Garraway ------ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ka34ie-IL88

Rudolph Nureyev --- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-oc_GvdFen0

Kara Tointon -------- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u2bNrgEl_g8

Darcey Bussell ------ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yfRlf1evsx8

Aliona Vilani ------- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tkYFEuNFNWM

Margot Fonteyn ---- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ff9wotb7pyM

Anton at the Back - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mGK68O5Ro9Y

Delilah ----------------- regrettably all her dance videos were lost in the Sodom and Gomorrah firestorm



Final, with 5 highest-voted dancers from Round 1 joining the 12 below, prizegiving on New Years Eve at midnight:

Gypsy Rose Lee ----- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zGnfgJYbBkQ

Michael Jackson ----- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u9OU-7kav_w

Pamela Stephenson -- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vukw339ofyA

Fred Astaire ---------- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YFI0r...eature=related

Madonna -------------- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H_POuZN1YA4&feature=fvsr

Matthew Cutler ------ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_rQHBmsXg-0

Ginger Rogers ------- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YsKC5L5tpxE

John Sergeant -------- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nv0e7esK8yM

Martha Graham ------ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ozu2M...4665E&index=12

Gene Kelly ----------- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7YWBOfsXsDA

Anna Pavlova -------- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ev2gePFcRyM&feature=fvsr

Michael Flatley ------ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C-pGzCre7Po



Clips of interest:

Spanish -- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7joI6...eature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XpG_w...eature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K2ALh...4080C&index=12

Flamenco - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xxfwm9N1L_4

Jazz dance Bob Fosse - Kiss Me Kate - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qw0FSREoaLQ

Jazz dance Matt Mattox - West Side Story - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cyVfHy517I4

Cyd Charisse - Silk Stockings - http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x5u...ngs_shortfilms

Anne Boleyn, dancing queen - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XEKD7K7ZGUk

Ooooh Not long to go now!

Thanks for a great thread soulmate61!

Thanks to all who contributed views and links. With only one video per dancer and an election looming, I tried to select from YouTube a representative example. If anyone knows of a fairer clip please let me know via open post or PM, thanks.

Where's Gene Kelly in the poll?

Gene arrives in the Final at midnight on Christmas Day.

Polling to date shows Kara and Rudolph Nureyev to be safely heading for the Final.
Margot Fonteyn is probably safe, but there is nothing between Alesha, Jill, and Darcey. At most only 2 from these 3 can go through to the Final. So in the immortal words of Tess,

Vote to save your candidate

Brucie has a cold again, so here are intros for 3 less wellknown dancers:

Salome – with a Hebrew name meaning peace (shalom), the young daughter of King Herod was anything but. Her story is immortalised in paintings (Titian), opera (Richard Strauss), ballet, poetry, songs, and 25 films. The femme fatale who raised sex appeal to an art form with contortions of her body; who subjugated the will and mind of a King with quivering breasts, heaving belly and tossing thighs, holds fascination for both men and women. The Dance of Seven Veils has to be the most famous dance in the world. Sadly no choreography was recorded. Perhaps just as well if men are to lose their heads over it.

Vaslav Nijinski - A turning point for Nijinsky was his meeting Diaghilev, who became heavily involved in managing Nijinsky's career. In 1909 Diaghilev took a company of Russian opera and ballet stars to Paris featuring Nijinsky and Anna Pavlov. This caused an artistic and social sensation. Nijinsky took the creative reins and choreographed ballets breaking traditional limits. For the first time his audiences were experiencing the futuristic, new direction of modern dance. His main talent was probably as much in his charisma and skill in mime and characterization as strictly technical. In technique he was famous for a leap so high in the air that he could bring his feet together 10 times before landing.

Isadora Duncan – born in California, at age 21 she moved to London, then Paris. She always danced barefoot, rejecting traditional ballet steps to stress improvisation, emotion and the human form.

Throughout her career Isadora disliked the commercial aspects of performance. The creation of beauty and the education of the young were her priorities, and she founded three dance schools. Both in her professional and private lives, Duncan flouted tradition, she was bisexual. At age 50 Isadora died in an accident. One end of her longflowing silk scarfe was round her neck, but the other end got caught in the open spokes of the car wheel. The scarfe tightened and strangled her.

Breaking with convention she traced dance back to its roots, free and natural movements inspired by classical Greek arts, folk dances, social dances, nature, and the new American athleticism which included skipping, running, jumping, leaping and tossing. With free-flowing costumes, bare feet and loose hair, Duncan restored dancing to a new vitality. Her celebrated simplicity was oceanic in depth and Isadora is credited with inventing what later came to be known as Modern Dance. Her style is still danced by a new generation. Carl Sandburg wrote in “Isadora Duncan”:

The wind? I am the wind.
The sea and the moon? I am the sea and the moon.
Tears, pain, love, bird-flights? I am all of them.
I dance what I am. Sin, prayer, flight, the light that never was on land or sea? I dance what I am.

Brucie still has a cold, so here is another intro, candidate available for voting from Christmas midnight.

Martha Graham (1894 – 1991) was an American dancer choreographer regarded as one of the foremost pioneers of modern dance, whose influence on dance can be compared to the influence Stravinsky had on music, Picasso had on the visual arts, or Frank Lloyd Wright had on architecture.

Martha was a galvanizing performer, a choreographer of astounding moves. She invented a new language of movement, and used it to reveal the passion, the rage and the ecstasy common to human experience. She danced and choreographed for over seventy years. As a link to the present, Madonna was her pupil in the 1970s and early 1980s.

"I have spent all my life with dance and being a dancer. It's permitting life to use you in a very intense way. Sometimes it is not pleasant. Sometimes it is fearful. But nevertheless it is inevitable."

Martha's dance style is based upon contraction and release of the body. For the majority of her life Martha resisted the recording of her dances and would not allow them to be filmed or photographed. She believed the performances should exist only live on the stage and in no other form. At one point she even burned volumes of her diaries and notes to prevent them from being seen.

Those who had the privilege of seeing her perform in her prime have attested to her precision, form and mesmerizing brilliance as a dancer on stage. Though she is arguably one of the most important choreographers in the history of dance she always said that she preferred to be known and remembered as a dancer. In the years that followed her departure from the stage Martha sank into a deep depression fueled by her viewing from the wings of young dancers performing many of the dances she had choreographed for herself and her late husband Erick Hawkins. Martha’s health declined precipitously as she abused alcohol to numb her pain.

“There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all of time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and it will be lost. The world will not have it. It is not your business to determine how good it is nor how valuable nor how it compares with other expressions. It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly, to keep the channel open. You do not even have to believe in yourself or your work. You have to keep yourself open and aware to the urges that motivate you. Keep the channel open. ... No artist is pleased, no satisfaction whatever at any time. There is only a queer divine dissatisfaction, a blessed unrest that keeps us marching and makes us more alive than the others." - Martha Graham

Happy Christmas

But Fred LED Ginger and did all their choreography! Not to take anything away from Ginger - she was a wonderful, elegant dancer. However, Fred Astaire was a sublimely talented dancer and could dance anything.

Fred Astaire - even today's professional dancers bow to his supremacy! (And you have to bear in mind Fred's heyday was 60 or 70 years ago. You have to have been good to make an impression that lasts so long.)

Three more links for our Christmas party:

Martha Graham –
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cLO_nphGm4s
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZY8kbP-behg

Darcey Bussell – Elite Syncopations - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oSGCoVXYtJs

Thanks for spending the time to look for those clips of Mattox and Fosse. I love West Side Story.


I am going to vote for Gene Kelly as Singing in the rain was on today.

Delighted, rummaging for clips broadened my view of dance. Can anyone comment how the flavour of dance is different in USA? Influence from Broadway and California? And the film world? I think I am right in saying the UK does not have a tradition of films featuring contemporary song and dance, apart from opera and ballet, but not since Gilbert and Sullivan.

Darcey is just so dam elegant.....

If anyone wants to save Darcey, she currently lies sixth and needs 4 votes within 30 minutes to pull level with Alesha and Jill. In case of equal votes all the dancers involved will go through to the Final.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oSGCoVXYtJs

Kara and Rudolph evidently will go through and do not need any more votes.

------------------------- Round 1 voting now closed --------------------------
Thanks to all who voted in this quiet time of the Strictly cycle. Sadly 12 dancers now leave us as 5 proceed to the Final:

Kara Tointon
Rudolph Nureyev
Margot Fonteyn
Jill Halfpenny
Alesha Dixon

------------------------- Round 1 voting now closed --------------------------

Few of the above qualify as "great dancers" personally appart from the great ballet dancers that have performed I adore watching Adam Garcia and apologies I have no link.

Adam Garcia at the Sydney Olympics - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FrK1DgRmuLM

I am utterly and totally confused by this thread!!!!!!
Is it a joke or have I drunk too much?
Kara, Alesha, and Jill are all very good dancers but great?????????????


Nureyev, Fonteyn, Graham, Nijinski, are 'greats' with years and years of intensive training to reach the highest levels of performance and athleticism.

Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly could also be considered as 'great's in popular dance.

However, I cannot see how participants/winners of SCD, etc , good that they may be, can in any way whatsoever be considered 'great'.

Gene Kelly

Are people seriously voting Kara above Rudolph Nureyev

It must be a joke.

Her 2 small children (along with their governess) drowned when her car slipped backwards into the Seine - not compatible with automobiles, I reckon.

Has anybody tried barefoot dancing a la Isadora and Martha Graham? I would think it would be kinder to the feet and knees. Cannot imagine what it would be like to dance in high heels, 28 times within one day.