Word: ballroomful
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After years of suffering the same fate, ballroom dancing is enjoying a renaissance of popularity, thanks to the ABC hit - which has avatars in almost every part of the world. Celebrities are clamoring to compete on the show and learning that dancing a tango or a waltz can actually be fun. (And, this being show biz, it is a plus that the brutal training schedule is a great way to drop a few pounds.) Just think of ice dancing as ballroom dancing - but navigating through a frozen dance floor on blades. Why shouldn't it benefit from the popularity...
...Absolutely," says Tony Dovolani, one of the professional ballroom dancers on Dancing with the Stars, who has partnered with model and wrestler Stacy Keibler and soap-opera star Susan Lucci. "I see a huge transition in ice dancing coming from [the influence of] ballroom dancing. Even the outfits, the arm styling, the way they carry themselves are more ballroom-like." (See the latest pictures from the 2010 Winter Games...
Skaters have long turned to ballroom-dance lessons to learn about carriage, posture and how to best present themselves to an audience of tens of thousands in ice arenas. But until actors and supermodels and athletes took to the dance floor in made-for-television competitions, ballroom had the mothball aroma of a quaint, bygone era, when learning to waltz was part of one's social education, like etiquette classes and lessons in table manners. So take the ingredients of DWTS, the waltz and tango and rumba, put quarter-inch blades on the dancers, and get them moving...
...turns the skaters complete and which edges they glide on when going into and coming out of moves. Ice dancers are also more constrained by rules as to how many steps they can take in between elements and how many seconds the man must hold his partner in lifts. Ballroom dancing, says Johnson, who won her season of DWTS in 2009, is also harder than it looks. "You don't get an appreciation of it just by watching it," she says. "But if you actually get into it and do it, it's rigorous, hard, and takes...
...goal in any dancing, whether it is in a ballroom or on ice, should be to tell a compelling story. "The priority is definitely the chemistry, the actual bringing the dance to life," he says. "If it's the tango, I want to see the drama and the passion. If it's the rumba, I want to see the love. If it's the waltz, I want to see the flow." There was quite a bit of that passion on the ice at Vancouver's Pacific Coliseum, which bodes well for ice dancing's popularity at future Games...