Thursday, December 25, 2014

decorating the dance room

Happy Solstice and happy new year (and whatever else you celebrate)!

My gift to myself has been to gradually decorate the dance room — for decades I have been collecting photos, mostly cut out of magazines, waiting for the chance to use them to adorn a dance studio. Many had been on the walls at EOSA, but came down when that program dissolved... Now I finally have walls to decorate again!

It is a bit of a laborious process — since the buildings are brand-new, we are not allowed to use tape, staples, nails, or anything else except blue painters' tape, so I have to cut out multiple little circles of painters' tape for the back of each picture. I have been using Tuesday afternoons, when the break-dance club is meeting in the room, to decorate. It's going slowly, and I've made just a dent in that blank-walls feeling, but it is a start...

Last week I finished the "dance ancestors" wall (the most important, of course!). My selection is skewed toward the photos that have appeared in my dance magazines over the years, so I'm a bit chagrined, as a longtime Hawkins dancer and a recent devotee of Duncan dance, that I have so relatively few pictures of Isadora Duncan and Erick Hawkins (I had to find a picture of Erick online, as the only ones in my collection were of Erick and Martha together) — not to mention only one small photo of Alvin Ailey. But it is good to have a representative sample of some of our ancestors, at any rate.



I also made a good start on a world dance wall, although it can certainly grow (I may need to do more searching for images, as the photos from dance magazines heavily favor ballet and modern dance)...


And, when we were working on the symmetrical and asymmetrical shapes project, I made it a priority to get my "shapes" posters up on the wall, along with an elements of dance poster...


I have so many more photos and so many more walls to decorate — but it feels good to have this much done!

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