The Beauty of Ballroom Dancing
Minuet, Murray, Maksim and Beyond
by Lisa M. Browder
The beauty of ballroom is that it’s accessible to all walks of life and all technique levels. That was not always the case.
In the seventeenth century, the courtly Minuet set the standard. Known as the “walking dance,” it was slow and stately, snaking around the enormous ballroom in a giant S shape. First performed by King Louis XIV, subsequent aristocracy would often take up to three months to perfect the Minuet’s footwork and patterns. Although Minuet may mean “little steps,” a misstep could spell social disaster.
Popular with kings and queens for almost 150 years, it was still in favor in George Washington’s day and age. Believed to be his favorite dance, he preferred to partner Betsy Hamilton, the wife of his secretary of the treasury.
Ballroom has always been viewed as a social dance, one in which the tempos and styles changed through the years according to the culture. For instance, the emancipation of women gave us the Charleston and the flappers. Ragtime music inspired the Foxtrot and Shimmy and swing music gave us the Jitterbug. And, of course, where would dance movies be without Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers?
As the dances developed, so did the idea that anyone could learn them. Witness the success of Arthur Murray. Born Arthur Teichman, he grew up on the lower East side of New York and started teaching dance in 1913. His dream was to make “ballroom” a household word.
One of his students, famed opera singer Enrico Caruso, jokingly suggested mailing instructions for one foot to interested students and when the first foot was paid for, following up with the other. A shrewd businessman, Murray liked the idea of “footprints” and developed diagrams depicting the dance steps. Six years later, his mail order business was bringing in $35,000.
Today, there are well over 200 franchised studios in Canada, Australia, South Africa, Germany, Israel, Italy and Puerto Rico, as well as most of America. As Toni Stevens, a ballroom teacher for some thirty-odd years with Arthur Murray Las Vegas Dance Studios says, “You have to start at the turn of the century when social dancing first became popular. So Arthur Murray is a ballroom teacher and he sees a way for him to make money and have fun and he popularized ballroom dancing.”
“The first competition, I think, was held in the 20’s…They danced because dance was part of the social fabric of things. We didn’t sit around and watch TV or go to the movies, right? We interacted with other humans.”
And Arthur Murray, along with his wife Kathryn, made sure ballroom was a part of the social fabric. As Stevens says, “Arthur Murray went, in the early part of the century, and he captured the essences of those different dances. They went everywhere. They went all over the world. They captured the essences of those dances and then they standardized them so they could break it down so that any teacher in any city in any part of the world or the country could teach that step, and wherever you went, that step was the same step. That’s the beauty of it. The man was a genius.”
Nevertheless, with the advent of the computer age, ballroom faded into the background. Too many people found themselves stuck in front of a computer screen and the sociability of dance seemed too daunting. Stevens says, “The perception is that this is something that other people do, you know what I’m saying?” She adds, “You can’t gauge somebody over the Internet. You’ve got to sit down and have a cup of coffee. You have to look them in the eye.”
Although “Dancing With the Stars” has helped restore eye-to-eye contact and ballroom’s popularity, Stevens is quick to put things in perspective. “People don’t live the ‘Dancing With the Stars’ lives…Our stars are plumbers and doctors and cocktail waitresses and dealers and stay-at-home moms and they’re normal people. They’re your neighbors. It’s your manicurist, the guy who runs the grocery store, the probation officer that supervises all the low-life criminals all day long. Guess what. He likes a little romance in his life.”
“People like to watch sports and they like to watch fabulous athletes, but the thing that brings them into the studio is real life. What can dancing do for you?”
Well, if you’re Maksim Chmerkovskiy, of “Dancing With the Stars,” it can bring notoriety and boundless opportunity. Born January 17, 1980, in Odessa, Ukraine, Chmerkovskiy’s parents put him in dance classes at a young age. He much preferred sports – any sport – but he stuck with ballroom dancing anyway. Then, as a teenager, he suffered a serious skiing accident that required several surgeries and the insertion of a metal rod from his hip to his knee. Dance became his physical therapy and within a matter of months, he worked his way back into the world of competitive dance.
By the time his family moved to America, he was waltzing off with dance titles – “US Open Finalist,” “Professional World Cup Finalist,” and “World Masters Finalist.” He’s been ranked second in the United States and seventh in the world. He relishes the competitions and believes they’ve helped raise the bar for good ballroom technique. He says, “There’s no ballroom dancing here or there was none until we came…We’re talking about Russia having hundreds of thousands of kids dancing. I don’t think we have over 500 competitive couples in this country.”
Chmerkovskiy is a formidable athlete and categorizes dance with other traditional sports. In fact, he refers to his field as “dancesport” and says, “To be totally honest, I think we’re more physically fit than some of the swimmers, or track and field, or football players, because we have to do it all. It’s not fair to just call us dancers. It’s very physically demanding.”
Calling it “dancesport,” however, is not a new idea. Dancesport has been under the auspices of an international organization for a number of years and is working toward recognition in the Olympics. The International DanceSport Federation boasts 85 national members. Although denied medal status for the 2008 Olympics, the IDSF continues to pursue that designation. If it succeeds, will Chmerkovskiy be participating? He says, “Absolutely not, because it’s corrupt. Unless we figure out a way to be judged fairly, I’m not interested.”
On “Dancing With the Stars,” judging is also a big part of the program and Chmerkovskiy, for the most part, thinks the judging is fair but, he adds, “I also think that the show is somewhat scripted. The judges don’t have as much freedom as you guys think they do to judge us fairly. A lot of times it doesn’t make sense to us, the judges’ scores.” He does, however, take exception to the audience votes. “The viewers are ridiculously not fair. Whenever a person is hiding behind an anonymous call, usually their opinion would not be really fair. If you put someone in public and say, ‘Who do you think should go home right now?’ that person would never say Sabrina, you know what I mean?”
Chmerkovskiy sets a high standard and expects his partners to value his opinion on choreography and the correct way to achieve a particular technique. He says, “I’m not into arguments at all. I don’t have a lot of time to spend arguing.” So if his partner insists on confrontation, he says, “You can walk away and be completely non-productive or you can shut up. I’m happy to say that usually I shut up. When she’s all done and vented, I get her to do what I wanted to do in the first place. It’s works 99 percent of the time.”
In addition to near-perfect dance scores, Chmerkovskiy’s talents have brought him notoriety off the dance floor and valuable contacts for new opportunities - opportunities to blend ballroom into a new, disparate form with unique flavors, rhythms and focus. Recently offered the chance to incorporate ballroom into “Le Reve,” an aquatic show at the Wynn Hotel in Las Vegas, Chmerkovskiy says, “I want to do ballroom with other elements involved. That’s all I’m going to say.” In “Le Reve,” those elements include aerialists, acrobats and water.
Paired with “Le Reve’s” Brian Burke, Chmerkovskiy is learning new ways to work with dancers and dance forms. Burke says, “My job on this is to direct how the ballroom will go in, because I’m the artistic director of ‘Le Reve. In this instance, we’re using the ballroom choreography to tell a story.”
To understand the significance of that statement, it’s necessary to understand that the show has been running since 2005; the story is set. It’s an added challenge to work within the constraints of someone else’s vision. Chmerkovskiy’s choreography must fit into the scope and theme of the show. As Burke says, “We’re not just randomly inserting things into the show. Does it just look like a piece of choreography or does it make sense? We don’t want it to stick out like a sore thumb.”
Burke adds, “It’s a whole new realm of creation. It’s very particular what movement reads well in this theater and in this space. It’s in the round. It’s in the water. People are flying. People are swimming. Sometimes Maks will set things in the studio and it doesn’t work in the theater. The movement has to be very percussive, very strong.” In essence, it must match the frame of the existing show. “Le Reve” (“The Dream,” in French), is the story of an “everyman” character and the inner journey of his dreams.
Additionally, the theater itself is quite unique. It’s a theater-in-the-round and a stage that, because of its circular design, has no backstage area. All performers and sets either appear from the water below or are flown in from above. Even the costumes are affected because they must be water-durable. No fluffy feathers or delicate gauzy fabrics.
And although many ballroom dances have a story, rarely does the overall story exist before and after the completion of the number. It is, therefore, not an isolated routine. As Burke says, “Here’s the difference we’ve found. We actually make individual pieces to fit in the show, so each of their movements has to have an intention to get from point A to point B.”
An “intention to get from point A to point B.” That’s a definition the courtly Minuet dancers of the seventeenth century would have understood – just not the scope of it today. They could not have foreseen, and would have been amazed at, the changes. From the instructional books and worldwide empire of Arthur Murray to the athleticism and sensuality of Chmerkovskiy’s dancesport, ballroom continues to intrigue and inspire.