Ballroom dance lessons make a perfect holiday gift because of the many benefits they can provide. Not only does dance help people to stay fit and healthy, but it also teaches them coordination, creativity and discipline. It’s a creative and out-of-the-box gift idea AND it’s a gift that keeps on giving.
Dance can be a great way for someone to express themselves creatively and learn something new in the process. It gives someone the freedom to explore their personal styles and tastes, and it’s a great way for someone to learn more about themselves (and the people around them).
Additionally, dance is known to reduce stress, improve moods, and foster better overall well-being. So, dance lessons can be a great way to help someone in your life improve their physical and mental health.
Arguably the best part about dance (especially ballroom dancing) is that it can be enjoyed by anyone, at any age and at any skill level. It doesn’t matter if you’re 7 or 70 — the benefits of dancing don’t discriminate by age. Everyone is sure to get meaningful experiences through dance! Plus, it’s a great and easy way to make friends that share a common interest with you. When it comes to ballroom dancing, working with a partner (or multiple) means you get to learn to work as a team and even make close friends!
The list of benefits of dance goes on. Whether they are looking to become more physically active or simply want an activity that helps them relax and unwind during holidays, ballroom dance lessons are sure to bring joy this festive season. There truly is no better way to celebrate the holidays than with dance lessons. So this year, give the gift of dance and watch your loved one’s eyes sparkle with joy!
Need help finding the perfect studio your loved one can start their dancing journey? Look no further than Fred Astaire Dance Studios! We have hundreds of experienced instructors ready to pass on the skills of expert dancers. Plus, we host social events and parties so you can get even more out of dancing! For more information, visit our website or give us a call today!
Let’s talk about stage fright. Whether you’re new to performing or you’ve been in front of audiences for years, everybody can admit it’s at least a little nerve-wracking. And yet, it’s the culmination of all the work dancers do! So, as a teacher or studio owner who teaches your dancers all about technique and artistry, how can you coach them through the practicalities of performing, like performance anxiety?
Andrea Kolbe, studio owner of Art in Motion Dance Center in Long Island, New York, shares how she spots and soothes students who are feeling nervous. We also spoke with Chicago-based dance/movement therapist Erica Hornthal, author of Body Aware.
Andrea Kolbe.
Step one is definitely identifying the problem – and it can start even before you get to the theater. Nerves might be affecting your dancer onstage, backstage or even in the studio well before the performance. Is one of your dancers wobblier than usual the week before? Has their attitude changed in rehearsals?
Kolbe says, “When we have our recitals, I can typically tell when the dancers are nervous because of the look on their face and being super jittery. Some will talk excessively, while others will be super quiet and focus inward. I also have some of the dancers verbalize that they are nervous to me or the other instructors backstage.”
If dancers can recognize for themselves and express to you that they’re not feeling their best, that’s fantastic. But it’s important to remember that nerves will look different on everyone. Different methods of dealing with those nerves might work better for some dancers, and other methods for others. Most dancers feel better after testing their shoes onstage and having time to try the choreography in the space. Some may need time and space to focus alone. Others might benefit from a connecting pre-show ritual with their group, like a huddle and pep-talk backstage to connect with their peers.
“Group camaraderie and teamwork definitely ease onstage jitters and nervousness,” notes Kolbe. “I’ve noticed over the past 13 years of teaching in a studio setting that dancers are much more nervous when they are performing a solo on stage.” In the scenario of solos, maybe take your dancer aside and learn what they personally need, whether that’s to burn off some energy, talk it out or do some breathwork.
Erica Hornthal.
We asked dance/movement therapist Erica Hornthal for her top three tips on dealing with those pesky jitters in the wings, or nervousness leading up to that moment. Her take?
#1. “Meet your emotions. Identify what/how you feel physically.”
#2. “Notice what the timing, rhythm and intensity of this emotion is. This will help you express it.”
#3. “Express it. This can be through shaking, tapping, jumping, bouncing, etc. There is no wrong movement when it comes to expressing how an emotion feels in your body.”
A simple 1 2 3, right? Well, if you want to make this method its most effective, it takes some practice. Mental health can’t only be addressed by three “top tips” when you’re already in the wings.
“Practice the above sequence at times when you are not feeling stressed, anxious or overwhelmed,” Hornthal encourages. “This will allow you to use it when you really need it.” Some of her other suggestions include moving in unfamiliar ways to build a greater emotional capacity, and checking in with your body regularly to identify emotions as they arise.
Andrea Kolbe backstage with students. Photo courtesy of Kolbe.
It’s about building good mental health habits. Be sure to introduce this to your students before the big day. When they’re feeling fear creep in at the studio, or before bed on recital eve or even when they’re not feeling stressed at all, they should use this method consistently so they know they can rely on it when they’re stepping onstage.
What does Hornthal feel is overlooked about performance anxiety? “Anxiety is a feeling. It’s normal,” she says. “You will never eliminate it. The key is noticing it, understanding it, even befriending it so we can dispel the fear and release the control it has over you. It is not something to be avoided, but rather confronted in a safe and compassionate manner.”
If only we had access to professionals like Hornthal in our studios! Few dance schools have the budget to have a dance/movement therapist on staff, but boy would it be helpful. Kolbe agrees that having a mental health expert come to the studio and give a lecture on recital anxiety would be beneficial to her dancers. If not a guest lecturer, what other mental health resources can we provide for our students? As teachers, it’s our job to set them up to do the best they can – and in a performance art, that includes giving them tools to dance without anxiety affecting their performance.
Diane DeFries, former executive director of the American College Dance Association, has been attending performances at The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts since it opened in 1971. At ACDA’s national festivals, she saw generations of students look awestruck upon walking into the imposing Washington, DC, performing arts center.
“Much to my despair, I feel like I cannot go to the Kennedy Center in good conscience at this point,” DeFries says. “The intention of this administration is to transform our national monument to the performing arts into an institution with values…that are counter to what the arts have been historically.”
The Kennedy Center is one of the largest performing arts centers in the U.S. Because of its capacity, reputation, and prominence as the country’s national cultural center, its programming in dance and beyond has vast influence. “It’s an important stage for America, and an important stage for the world,” says Alicia Adams, who was vice president of international programming and dance until she was let go in May.
Earlier this year, President Trump decried the Center’s programming as “woke,” and in August, while announcing the latest class of Kennedy Center Honorees, he leaned in: “We reversed what was happening. We ended the woke political programming and we’re restoring the Kennedy Center as the premier venue for performing arts anywhere in the country, anywhere in the world.”
Droves of dance and other performing artists, arts managers, and loyal Kennedy Center audience members appear to disagree. Many dancers and choreographers in the greater Washington, DC, metropolitan region, like DeFries, are weighing whether attending events there would be a tacit endorsement of President Trump’s policies.
The cast of Project ChArma’s Crates at National Dance Day 2023. Photo courtesy Project ChArma.
Chris and Ama Law, co-directors of the Maryland-based dance theater company Project ChArma, grew up in the DC area but only recently began to feel like the Center was a place for them. In 2019, Jane Raleigh—then the Kennedy Center’s dance programming director, who made a concerted effort to broaden the representation of local dance companies across genres in Center programming—invited Project ChArma to present their piece Rooted at the Center’s Millennium Stage. The Laws were later invited to help curate 2023’s National Dance Day event dedicated to hip hop, and subsequently received a coveted Local Dance Commissioning Project award, which came with a $20,000 commission and a performance slot in the Center’s Terrace Theater.
Project ChArma is scheduled to perform Saturday, September 20, at this year’s National Dance Day. “But now I don’t know about buying tickets,” Ama Law says. “I’ll just do my damnedest to find comps, or wait for discounts…anything that gives the institution less of my money.” At the same time, the Laws are thinking about the impact of boycotts on dance artists. “I would hate to be that artist who is performing to an empty crowd, knowing how hard I worked,” Ama Law says.
Absent from this Kennedy Center season is Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, a perennial favorite engagement at the Opera House. Ailey week at the Kennedy Center not only frequently sold out, but the opening night company benefit has been a major fundraiser for Ailey, bringing in over $1.2 million this past February. This year the company opted to perform instead at DC’s Warner Theatre. It declined to comment on that decision.
Without strong ticket sales, dance at the Kennedy Center may not be sustainable. “In 2021 the pandemic crashed everything in terms of ticket sales and subscriptions,” Raleigh says. “In subsequent years we were seeing more robust subscriptions than many of our dance-presenting colleagues nationally. And our single tickets were selling in the 70-to-80-percent–capacity range for most of our [dance] engagements, some much better. Houses were full, we were feeling good about it.” She noted—and Adams confirmed—that the newly hired Trump-endorsed upper managers were very complimentary on dance programming earlier this year.
Raleigh plans on attending the 2025–26 season, which she partially booked. “ ‘Come see dance’ was my position when I was inside the Kennedy Center, and it remains my position now,” she says. “Support the artists who are on those stages and my colleagues who remain working at the Kennedy Center.” Adams, who spent three decades of her career in programming at the Center, says that she is also looking forward to supporting the dance companies she booked for the coming season. “If there’s something there that you believe in and respect, a company whose work you have supported or want to see, then support them,” she says. “Be in that audience to cheer them on.”
“To go or not to go,” however, remains the question. Vincent Thomas, a Baltimore-based dance artist and educator whose company, VTDance, has been presented on the Kennedy Center’s Millennium Stage, last came to a performance at the Center in August—one day after Raleigh and the rest of the dance programming team were fired. “I felt for these artists and I felt an obligation, a need, to support them,” he says. But Thomas, like many other formerly dedicated dance patrons, has yet to purchase tickets for the 2025–26 dance season.
On his first day in office, President Trump issued a series of executive orders limiting the rights of transgender and nonbinary Americans, from stating that the U.S. government would recognize only male and female genders to removing gender options from passports. His orders targeted rights and protections attained through years of courageous advocacy. And award-winning San Francisco choreographer Sean Dorsey has been at the forefront of those efforts for more than two decades, as an activist, an educator, and the artistic director of Sean Dorsey Dance. On the eve of the company’s 20th-anniversary home season, Dorsey spoke about living as a transgender person in the U.S. today, and how dance can meet this sociopolitical moment.
Sean Dorsey. Photo by Lydia Daniller, courtesy Dorsey.
How is the current political climate affecting you personally? This is a moment of total dire emergency for trans communities. Our bodily autonomy, our freedom of movement across borders or states, our freedom of expression, and our most basic civil liberties have been stripped. Myself and the transpeople I know are experiencing off-the-charts daily anxiety, fear, depression, and rage.
As an artistic leader, how are you responding? My work is about creating sanctuary. In the creative and rehearsal process with my dancers, I work really hard to build trust and safety, and bring in lots of humor and play. And audiences still rarely have the experience of seeing work that centers trans and queer bodies and experiences. My life calling has been about creating that kind of sanctuary. There’s no way I’m backing away from that work. I’m digging in deeper.
This season, Sean Dorsey Dance will be performing works that highlight trans history: Lou, The Missing Generation, and The Secret History of Love. What does that mean to the community right now? At the very moment when so many forces are working systematically to erase our history and our existence—we’re seeing the word “transgender” being removed from the Stonewall Monument’s website, for example—it feels more important than ever, and excruciatingly timely, to be performing works that embody our history. All the works assert the worth, beauty, wisdom, and value of trans and queer bodies and lives. To be doing these works feels incredibly important.
How can dance help us right now? Artists have always been at the forefront of resisting tyranny and forwarding justice and creating magic and joy. And this time is no different. The beauty of art is that it is truly uncontainable—it’s unstoppable. Artists are storytellers, and we’re truthtellers. And truth cannot be extinguished, no matter how hard tyrants try. Truth will always be victorious. Love will always be victorious over hate.
But the victories will not happen automatically—they will only happen if we all step up and take action. To those who are feeling discouraged, look for the heroes and she-roes and they-roes in history, when artists and activists created so many roadmaps for us, so many tools. This will be a marathon, so we must take care of each other and ourselves.
How does creating and performing dance make you feel hopeful? Dance is a physical art form; its instrument is embodiment. Whether we are in the audience or onstage, dance locates us and reconnects us to our body and our breath. I truly believe in the enormous healing potential of dance. I’ve seen it, I’ve lived it, I know it.
A sharp wind was blowing in Washington, DC, on the morning of Monday, February 17, as 36 dancers processed single file around the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. Threading in front of the modernist white marble edifice, then across a plaza with views of the Potomac River, they danced the spare but meaningful gestures of the late choreographer Pina Bausch’s “The Nelken Line,” from her 1982 work Nelken (“carnations”). One participant pulled a portable speaker playing Louis Armstrong’s bright “West End Blues,” Bausch’s choice of music. It was both a performance and a protest, a reaction to the orchestrated takeover of the nation’s performing arts center by recently inaugurated President Donald Trump.
When Kelly King, who directs DC’s Contradiction Dance, heard earlier this month that Trump had been made chairman of the Center’s board, she felt compelled to act. “Why aren’t we in the streets yet? When are we getting in the streets to march?” she remembers asking herself. On Friday, February 14, she put out a call on social media, inviting dancers in the area to a protest at the Kennedy Center the following Monday.
“As dancers,” King says, “we know how to quickly, effectively pull our community together. Sometimes we just confidently make decisions and move.”
Fellow choreographer Keira Hart-Mendoza reached out to King. In 2020, during the height of the pandemic, her Bethesda, MD-based UpRooted Dance Company had used the simple repetitive gestures of “The Nelken Line” for a socially distanced outdoor dance event. “I feel like it’s such a calm, delicate, and useful way to make a statement,” says Hart-Mendoza. Prior to the protest, King and Hart-Mendoza convened two weekend Zoom meetings to teach the choreography to the group of volunteer dancers.
While King and Hart-Mendoza were in communication with Kennedy Center staff, King noted they didn’t ask permission. On the morning of the 17th, with no shows in the building due to the Presidents’ Day holiday, security outside was high, King reports—but by the end, those sent to monitor the dancers were chatting and sharing videos of the protest dance.
Dancers performing Pina Bausch’s “The Nelken Line” in front of the Kennedy Center. Photo by David Dowling/Dancing in the District.
The 30-minute performance was meant to foster solidarity among dance artists, and to demonstrate their visceral response to President Trump’s recent firing of all Biden-appointed Kennedy Center board members and subsequent takeover of the board. Dance artist, director, and educator Jessica Martiné Denson says her choice to protest was personal. “Having lived in the DC area for almost my entire life, the Kennedy Center holds a lifetime of memories for me and so many of my friends and colleagues,” she says. “I cannot idly stand by as it is under siege—not participating was not an option.”
Longtime Washington choreographer and dancer Deborah Riley, director emerita of Dance Place, received an email invitation from King to participate. “It really sparked something for me,” Riley says. “Whatever statement we could make collectively about this corner of the world—the Kennedy Center and the arts—I felt was important.”
Kelly is planning another dance protest for Saturday, March 15, this time at the Lincoln Memorial, one of Washington’s grandest monuments. She hopes this second round will go national. “We invite dancers around the country and around the world to meet in their communities, choose a culturally significant landmark in their city, and learn ‘The Nelken Line,’ ” she says. “Let’s do this as a simultaneous eruption of dance as protest.” Tutorials on the Bausch choreography can be found on YouTube.
After seeing the Kennedy Center protest video on social media, Chicago dancer and choreographer Ramón Muñoz made his own version, recording himself dancing the Bausch choreography in front of Chicago’s Trump Tower. “I have to see the Trump Tower every day when I go downtown,” he says, “so I knew in my heart that someone had to be in front of that building echoing the message of the DC dancers.” He plans to convene a group of Chicago dancers March 15.
“I want dancers to feel very empowered to take this into their communities and to get in practice with protest,” King says. “Who better to peacefully protest than the dance community?” She adds: “We may need to do this for the next four years.”
Arguably the best part about dance (especially ballroom dancing) is that it can be enjoyed by anyone, at any age and at any skill level. It doesn’t matter if you’re 7 or 70 — the benefits of dancing don’t discriminate by age. Everyone is sure to get meaningful experiences through dance! Plus, it’s a great and easy way to make friends that share a common interest with you. When it comes to ballroom dancing, working with a partner (or multiple) means you get to learn to work as a team and even make close friends!
