Reply to Licorice (3rd attempt) hopefully without <o:p></o:p> appearing!

From: Siskin1729  (Original Message)

Sent: 10/12/2006 08:56

It must be at least three months since the Polish TV cancan video on Youtube which prompted Licorice to ask several questions along the lines of, what is it that you men like about watching cancan dancing. Perhaps it would be fun if someone composed a customer survey for members – anyone out there into market research? Licorice, I forget, I think you were either a dancer or were associated with a dance group, and your objective was to please the customer, yes? So here is my answer. I will, of course, watch any cancan, but this is what I like to experience when watching a really good one. (Remember, opinions differ. One man’s meat is another man’s poison.) The Music. Forget Baz Luhrmann’s dreadful film Moulin Rouge. Its music and dancing belong in the dustbin. (Trashcan, to you, I suspect.) Offenbach's traditional music is the best skeleton, on to which you can hang any Polka or Gallop. There are plenty of those in ballet and classical music. Looking at my CD track ‘Hooked on a Cancan’, I see it lists: - Orpheus in the Underworld, La Vie Parisienne and Gaiete Parisienne (Offenbach). Thunder and Lightning Polka and Tritsch Tratsch Polka (Strauss II). Hungarian Dance (Brahms). Gallop (Ponchielli). Czardas (Monti). Overture to Dichter Und Bauer (Suppe). I have also seen these used: - Sabre Dance (Khachaturian). Champagne Gallop (Lumbye). There is music from musicals and operetta. ‘Can-Can’ (Cole Porter) and ‘Die lustige Witwe / The Merry Widow (Franz Lehar), to name but two of the most obvious ones. Yes, I like the cancan danced to classical music. The Costume. Head-dress. Girls, I don’t mind what you wear on you heads so long as it is pretty, feminine and does not stop you doing acrobatics. The dress. The dress, fairly obviously, has to be traditionally full. I do not mind whether it is flounced or quilted so long as it falls and swings easily. It should at least appear to be light in weight. I am sure the girls in the dance would appreciate a lightweight dress made with modern materials and perhaps one old material namely silk. For the dance team the dresses need to be identical in style but not necessarily in colour. If colours are different they need to be co-ordinated. If you think of notes in music, they fit into scales and keys; colours need to do something similar. I wonder at this stage whether I have ever looked at the top half of the dress – just make it feminine and fitted at the waist! The skirt, and the ability of the girls to manipulate it skilfully, make or break the dance for me. I cannot tell a girl how to play with her skirt in such a way that it thrills the boys, but that is what you have to do girls; play with your skirt and disrupt our cardiovascular rhythms. I expect to see your knickers but I don’t want to be shown them directly! Really, believe me! Tease me with your dancing skills and leave you flying skirts to expose what they will. If you are standing still, lift your skirt to show me as much leg as you can, without deliberately exposing your knickers. Any exposure might be carelessly deliberate on your part but I have to believe it is accidental. Believe me, it is not what I see that is sexy, it is what I catch in a fleeting glimpse of or don’t quite see. The tease is sexy. The underwear. This is, I suspect, where I go off at a tangent from most of my male colleagues. I am not actually a big fan of stockings and suspenders. I prefer to see superb legs uncluttered all the way up, perhaps a small garter being the only allowable exception. I am not a big fan of frilly panties either and pantaloons, bloomers and knickerbockers belong in the nineteenth century. I prefer smooth and close fitting underwear. I am undecided about the rear view. I am not a particular fan of the Royal Flash either, but the one provided by those Russian girls in a video link on CCD earlier this year when they only wore G-strings was sensational; but they had bottoms to die for and not many of us have that! Okay! - A decision. Smooth and fitted at the front cut to a G-string at the rear, so long as you have a perfect bum; but not frilly knickers, they are old fashioned. The footwear. I am not a fan of the oft used ankle boots. They can look heavy and a bit dykie. I much prefer strapped dancing shoes, although having said all that, I recall another video from Fernsehballet of Germany in which the girls looked fantastic wearing knee length boots, maybe it is just the ankle boots that I dislike. Ballet shoes get the thumbs up from me, they are ultra feminine. I have seen the cancan done in ice-shows and girls can even look sexy wearing ice-skates. Maybe I should give the ankle boots one more chance but they always look as if the dancers have been outside in bad weather. There is an idea. If you want to wear the boots start the dance by appearing in a fur trimmed outdoor coat and throw it off to reveal a cancan dancer. I digress! The dance - fitness and choreography. Let us face it girls, this dance is not for those of you who have never had a dancing lesson in your lives, but having said that, even the local dancing school can put on a credible cancan with some cleaver choreography. It is essential that you can do the splits, and your dance teacher will love you if you can do splits in all and every direction and change between them without loosing the one-eighty degrees. I don’t know the technical names for all of the moves but I expect to see at least some of your high kicks go into, or very close to, vertical splits. These should be done quite early on in the dance number, to give us notice that you can do it and to build anticipation for what is to come. Your foot lifts, leg extensions and hitch kicks all have to send your foot way above your head, so way beyond what ordinary mortals can achieve. I also like to see cartwheels, walkovers both backwards and forwards, spins, fuettes, and anything else you can borrow from dance, acrobatics and gymnastics. It goes without saying, you going to need a strong and supple body with a lot of stamina. You are going to have to bend backwards and forwards to tight angles quickly and effortlessly. There are also pretty things, girly things that you can do with you legs and feet almost by way of getting your breath back; see eastern European folk dancing. You can also take a breather by doing those tableaux type things, one of which is called the Cathedral. That particular one is never very pretty and often clumsy, I wouldn’t bother with it. I prefer to see the dance break up into solo’s, pair’s, foursome’s etc. while the other dancers have a few seconds rest. To sum up. The music, the costume, the dancing, the tease, the sheer energy and suppleness of the girls combined with a sense that they delight in being liberated and female.  These things make this dance for me.  Footnote. I am puzzled as to why some choreographers still include men in this dance. I know men have done it in the history of the dance but that was more than a hundred years ago, times change. I like it modern (hence no S & S) and since as long ago as the nineteen twenties the cancan has been a dance for girls. If the boys must be in on the action, let it be a merely supporting role, even that, to my mind is superfluous. Do they really want to cavort around doing girly things like high kicks and splits? I like male dancers to stick to the macho elements of stage dancing and be there to present or compliment the girls. I once saw a great routine where the boys were in motor-cycle leathers, each with a gleaming black and silver bike, and the girls were deliciously female and danced the cancan. Alas I have never seen a video of it. There is lots of scope for masculinity in dance, just think of Latin, Greek, Turkish and Russian dance. Anyone care to discuss the Tango, the Tarantella or the Kazatzka? Siskin.