"I would like to talk about �Sleeping Beauty� and �Swan Lake,� about my battements and my handsome partners..."

"But whichever way I look at my childhood, it all revolves around politics and Stalin�s terror," wrote the great ballerina Maya Plisetskaya, who has died at the age of 89.

Her father was shot to death in 1938 in Stalin�s purges. (Ms. Plisetskaya learned the date of his death only in 1989.) Her mother was arrested and sent to a labor camp with her infant son, then exiled to Kazakhstan....

Ms. Plisetskaya was... restricted by the Bolshoi�s rigid Soviet guidelines on choreography, which viewed the very movement of dance through the prism of ideology, yet she was able to infuse stultified, literal movements with much deeper meaning....

�I danced all of classical ballet and dreamed of something new,� she said. �In my time, it was impossible.�

I'd like to hear more specifically how ballet movements could be thought to contain political ideology. I once met a woman in Madison who had learned a difficult craft that produced a type of ordinary object � a lovely version of something quite utilitarian. She expressed anguish in not yet having found a way to make these objects political. I said I thought that loading politics into art tended to make bad art. I dreamed of interesting conversations in Madison. Many years later, I started this blog.

ADDED: I don't like tag proliferation, so I'm using my "merging politics and showbiz" for this. It seems wrong to call ballet "showbiz," but think about it. Why is it wrong? It isn't!

Ah, but I remember I also have an "art and politics" tag. I remember that tag as I think of the conversation with the Madison artisan. Why did those crafted objects prompt me to think "art" when ballet did not? Because I thought of art school.

People dancing in movies are all doing the same dance.

Except Cher. She's doing The Monkey.

Based on that set of clips the essential movie dance is: Face forward, plant your feet apart, elbows up and out sideways, punch one fists up and then the other in a way that causes movement in the rest of your body. No real footwork is involved. The actors in the movies in that video are not Fred Astaire.

"The 1960s Dance Craze That NOBODY Remembers�I�m Crying From Laughing So Hard!"

Well, hell. Go ahead and act like that. Whether the Nitty Gritty is a specific dance or not, I remember the single, and I accept this as absolutely core 60s dancing:

"Dancing in public squares represents the collective aspect of Chinese culture, but now it seems that the overenthusiasm of participants has dealt it a harmful blow with disputes over noise and venues."

"So we have to guide it with national standards and regulations," said Liu Guoyong, who heads China's General Administration of Sport�s mass-fitness department.

"That�s ridiculous," said Xiao Kai, 50, taking a break from dancing at an office complex that drew more than 100 women and a smattering of men. "This isn�t a business. Dancing is free and voluntary, so why does the government need to get involved?"...

[China's official news agency] said that in the future public dancing would no longer vary from place to place but would become �a nationally unified, scientifically crafted new activity that brings positive energy to the people.�

Click for more �

New Year's Eve, circa 1955.

At our house in Newark, Delaware, this was going on:



(From my edits of old home movies. My mother is the blonde. My father is the one I showed you 3 posts down � that is to say, not the man on whose lap you will see my mother sitting.)

"But basketball players increasingly cover their lower bodies, mostly out of fashion, partly out of protection, sometimes out of prudish modesty."

"In a trend on full display at the N.C.A.A. men�s tournament, skin is concealed behind the triple protection of shorts hemmed below the kneecap, socks raised to the calf and a base layer of tights underneath."

Time to get rid of the shorts!

Remember that in ballet, men wore shorts over their tights...



... until they didn't....