Starting Now - Brief Article

Dance Magazine, May, 2001 by K.C. Patrick

May. The merry month of May: flowers after the April showers. At the first sign of sun, New Yorkers are out in shorts walking their dogs, birds, and snakes, and Californians open the surfing shops. It's Walpurgis Night (April 30), May Day (May 1), tap, tap, tap, school's out, Memorial Day weekend, and a slick slide into summer.

Our Summer Performance Guide 2001, exclusive to Dance Magazine [see page 4], jump starts your plans for dance viewing with a comprehensive look at performances and festivals clear through to Labor Day, Indian summer, back-to-school September. This year we've added snapshots of delicious locations where you can spend a week or so feasting on amazing workshops and sumptuous performances--and still find time for rest and relaxation. Plan with it in hand.

Tap. An American art form now 300 years young, it was at first a fusion of immigrant dance expression as diverse as African flat-footed polyrhythmic stamping, Celtic clog ,dancing, and the sounds of the streets in increasingly urban America. Tap images are part of our dance heritage: Bojangles and Shirley Temple on the stairs, Fred and Adele Astaire and then Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, the Nicholas Brothers, Gene Kelly and Donald O'Connor, the Radio City Music Hall Rockettes, the Mouseketeers, Brenda Bufalino, Gregory Hines, Savion Glover, and "One" from A Chorus Line. Certainly the spawn of Riverdance have provided more jobs for tap dancers than anything since vaudeville--and reintroduced flamenco and kathak besides. There have been waves of Tap Dogs tours, a STOMP in every city, and the U.S. Tap Dance Team taking the world championship cup year after year after year. We tip our hats to those honored on the day in May especially devoted to tappers (see "How Tap Got Its Day" on page 56).

These are just two focuses this month in the magazine, and like spotting when you dance in a circle, the focus changes to maintain balance. The wondrous paradox about Dance Magazine is that it is always there for you, constant and on time; yet its strength has been the flexibility to change, meeting the readers' needs throughout its almost seventy-five years. In Dance Magazine's history, it has had a dozen or so editors in chief and a hundred or more consulting and contributing editors, including stalwarts Ann Barzel and Doris Hering, who after almost sixty years of service still contribute significantly and regularly. Fortuitously, there are many on whom to call for wisdom; we mine their experiences, profiting and learning from their mistakes and successes.

But we do not live in the past--we honor it, but do not focus there. Dance Magazine will always be changing to better meet your needs. Coming soon to a random sample of you subscribers will be a questionnaire that will help us tailor the magazine to your needs and situations. Please answer if you receive a survey form; it will help us and it should help you. But you need not wait: Write and let me know what you like--and what you would like to see here in this journal of dance. I can try to make it happen.

I am new in this editor-in-chief's chair, and truth to tell it feels less like a throne than a pilot's seat of some fantastic vehicle: part Good Humor truck providing eye candy to some and brain freezes to others; part city bus transporting readers to another place, with new sights and ideas to absorb along the way; part rocket to outer space, with a close-knit crew always searching for what's out there.

As for what's out there, the possibilities are endless. That rocket may not find life on other planets, but the dance world is teeming with it, and the volume, variety, and talent brought to our attention on a daily basis are astounding. At a recent brainstorming session among our editorial staff, the suggestions for future issues were never ending and reflected the wide range of interests in even this small group. We want to bring it all to you--an impossible dream. But there are nuggets that provoke us, and trends that excite us, and glimpses into the past that make us sigh with awe and nostalgia. These we can bring you--and we shall.

Happy dancing.

K.C. Patrick, Acting Editor in Chief