While I won't be doing the SYTYCD Play By Play until tomorrow evening, I wanted to make one comment on Katee and Joshua's Mia Michaels' piece. As Nigel would say: Brilliant. I'm not sure the judges did it justice. They certainly commended the dancers for giving commanding performances, but to me, Katee and Joshua did much more than that. They committed one hundred percent to Michaels' sometimes scary, sometimes dangerous choreography. When Katee ran across the stage with Joshua holding her, it looked surreal...as if she were a superhero able to dash from place to place on hyper speed.

I was hoping Mary Murphy wouldn't scream, only because it would undermine the power of the dance. Thankfully, she didn't. Instead, she surprised me by coming up with the most intuitive critique of the night. She said that one of the best moments of the dance...when Katee and Joshua were simply walking forward...created a "monumental stillness." Couldn't say it better.

What did you all think? What was your favorite dance of the evening?

It's great when dancers see the humorous side of their art form, and tappers have been known to send themselves up with some regularity.  Here's the great Sandman Sims doing a little "challenge" with Bill Cosby.  But is this the funniest tap dance clip out there?  Read on and decide for yourself.

July Fourth.  What do you think about?  Fireworks, picnics, red-white-and-blue, stars and stripes, parades, right?  And maybe glitzy costumes and national dance competitions, too?

Over the years, Satin Stitches has been asked to create many different Patriotic dance costumes.  Some have been for dance soloists and some have been for entire dance teams-either for studio lines or for high school dance teams.

We have designed and created several camouflaged outfits, or military uniforms, some for hip-hop styles and even some that were rhinestoned, for very glamorous looks.  But my FAVORITE Patriotic solo costume is shown here.  It was created for a solo dance performance.  It was created for a very emotional, patriotic endeavor.  It was created for an auction to raise money for the victims of 9-11, in New York City.  

In order to understand how to make your dancing look natural we must first Study the human body. The human body is a remarkable machine. It produces many " magical" natural functions, which we will now study. I will show you how it can help you understand and improve your dancing style and technique the NATURAL way.

The International Tap Association - the world's only service organization for tap - has just moved its headquarters to Austin, Texas, and named Acia Gray, the co-founder and Artistic Director of Tapestry Dance Company, as president.  Read on to learn more about how ITA can benefit you and what this move means for the ITA's many members.

A teacher who can truly shapeshift an eager student is one that will continue to shapeshift themselves. Up up up up-this is the only place to go when constantly feeding off of each other. What a great reciprocation. I can only hope to be this kind of admirable icon one day who constantly gives back to the hungry student dancer, the teacher being the hungriest and the most well fed.

One of my favorite websites (besides DancerUniverse), the highly reputable literary and political site Salon.com, has published two interesting and informative articles on dance in the last week. The first article, called "So You Think They Can Break-Dance?"  is by writer Jeff Chang, a hip-hop historian who explores the b-boy scene in South Korea. A little late in coming (those of us familiar with hip-hop can tell you that Korea's breaking skills have been buzzed about for the better part of the decade), the article does provide a well-researched back story to the reasons for hip-hop's popularity in the Asian country. It's a good in-depth read!