Five women in leather-soled boots sweep their feet across a sand-covered stage, accenting the music in maraca-like rhythms. With its chugs, brushes, heel drops and slides, their movement looks a lot like tap dancing, but the sound is different—scratchier and rougher. This is sand dance. The scene described is from tap dancer/choreographer Melinda Sullivan’s 2012 […]
Talk about inspiring. It seems like kind of a given that if you want to dance to music, you have to be able to hear it. But the human body is amazing, and human willpower even more so. Case in point: Macy Baez, a 15-year-old Australian hip-hop dancer who happens to be deaf. She feels […]
Meet the Lady Dragons of Brooklyn Technical High School. They are the loudest-clapping, strongest-stomping step team in Brooklyn, and they rock. VICE Sports made a super-cool mini-documentary featuring the Lady Dragons as they prep for a regional competition. As team captain Christina Saint Jean explains in the doc, stepping is “the art of using your […]
Belén Maya and Manuel Liñán in Los Invitados (photo by Javier Fergo, courtesy Jerez Festival) With its precise, tap-style footwork and intricate hand and arm movements, flamenco dance embodies both the grounding heaviness of life’s challenges and the uplifting nature of the human spirit. It’s also based on an extremely complex rhythmic structure. But that […]