I lead a free and very informal waltz class many Thursday evenings at Idlewild Presbyterian Church and an occasional Waltz Right In at Calvary Episcopal Church in downtown Memphis ($6).
I was, for nine years, the coordinator of Memphis’ annual contra dance weekend: Memfest.
I am available to teach country or turning waltz for groups and festival weekends. Here’s an example of how I think of waltz:
Waltzing is fundamentally like any other musical dance: it’s a way of listening to the music by using your whole body. Listen to this description of a waltz. It’s my thinking, but Richard Powers started me thinking this way.
A good waltz tune has three parts to it: (1) a flirt, (2) a swell, and (3) a resolution.
The flirt is often a single instrumental introduction to the tune, as if the musicians are saying, “Here’s what we’re offering for you to dance to.”
The Swell, is the gradual introduction of more instrumentation, lifting the tune’s complexity up with each new instrumental interpretation (which are often show-cased individually with the other instruments playing back-up). During this part, because the dancers have learned the tune in the Flirt and gained some understand of their partner’s skills, they will be aroused into all sorts of dance interpretations to the music.
The resolution is offered in two ways. Lively tunes often end suddenly, as if the driver just slammed on the brakes. It usually makes the dancers laugh. Softer tunes have an easing off period, not as long as the flirt, but it softens, slows down, and ends peacefully. Both endings, though, are telegraphed. Before the sudden ending in the best lively tunes, the musicians make you think it’s ending, then they kick it one more time before they stop. The softer tunes’ endings imply that the tune, like the dancers, are tiring out, satiated and peaceful.
In Praise of Dance by Saint Augustine
I praise the dance, for it frees people from the heaviness of matter
and binds the isolated to community.
I praise the dance, which demands everything:
health and a clear spirit and a buoyant soul.
Dance is a transformation of space, of time, of people
who are in constant danger of becoming all brain, will or feeling.
Dancing demands a whole person,
one who is firmly anchored in the center of one’s life.
Dancing demands a free person,
one who vibrates with the equipoise of all one’s powers.
I praise the dance.
O, people, learn to dance,
or else the angels in heaven will not know what to do with you.