This week saw the passing of one of great Hollywood sirens who memorably graced a surprisingly short roll-call of movies with her extraordinarily long legs and shapely hourglass figure. I refer, of course, to the woman Bob Hope once described as "the two and only Jane Russell"!
Here she is in what was (for the time) a shocking outfit, dancing up a storm and singing 'Lookin' for Trouble' in the 1954 film, The French Line; and having a ball in the hysterically camp 'Ain't There Anyone Here for Love' routine from the previous year's Gentlemen Prefer Blondes...
As anyone who has ever visited our Greek island of choice - Kalymnos - will know we are habitués of George and Irene Glinatsi's taverna, Artistico.
And, as I've mentioned before, Artistico is a place where people contribute to the entertainment on an often nightly basis. Regular visitors who play guitar will bring their own instrument (or borrow one of George's) and will play - sometimes solos, sometimes duets, sometimes something Greek, sometimes something from their own musical culture.
Then there's also our good friend Roger who brings his kazoo and spoons and has been known to play both - simultaneously! But it's OK, he's not there year all year round! Sorry, Roger, only joking!
And, as usually happens in Greece when music is played, people dance!
Even I - in those now far off years when I was fitter and suppler - was occasionally known to take to the floor: memorably on one occasion (and I fear that there may be photos somewhere to prove it) engaging in a faux-fandango with Irene while wearing (don't ask why; ouzo can make a man do ludicrous things!) an outsize Pint-of-Guinness-hat... But, again, don't worry: I'm not there all round either!
David normally restricts himself to his regular magic performances, but maybe once a year - and this year it was on our Last Night - he will also trip the light fantastic. And when he does, it is an experience not to be missed!
So, here's David's singular interpretation of a traditional Greek dance with a little assistance/encouragement from George Glinatsi.
My thanks to David for permission to blog this and I hope that it brings a smile to your day!
Once again, in the interests of the Kalymnian Tourist Industry, David isn't at Artistico all year round!
Happily for me, however, I've had him around for 365 days a year, for almost two decades!
I mentioned that I was talking with Marge Champion last week about her work on Disney's Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs for which she had provided live-action film footage to enable the animators to create a convincing human character in such scenes as the one in which she and the dwarfs are singing and dancing together...
Marge recalled also having provided the Disney artists with reference footage for their animation of the Blue Fairy in Pinocchio and the dance steps - though not the physical bulk - for the balletic hippo in Fantasia...
This reminded me that I have long been intending to blog about a terrific book that will be of interest to musical film fans, animation buffs and lovers of dance.
Written by Mindy Aloff (a distinguished dance critic and a teacher of dance history)Hippo in a Tutu: Dancing in Disney Animation is, as the title proclaims, a study of dance in Disney films and it is as wide-ranging as the animated pictures that emerged from the studio over the years.
In 1929, just one year after the debut of Mickey Mouse in Steamboat Willie, Disney released his first 'Silly Symphony' cartoon, a series set to popular and classical tunes, that allowed the animators to explore a diverse range of characters and stories.
The first of those 'Silly Symphony' experiments was entitled Skeleton Dance...
Seven years later, here's Mickey Mouse in colour dancing up a storm in the 1936 cartoon, Thru the Mirror...
Donald Duck was also quite a hoofer as can be seen from his jitterbugging performance in the 1940 short, Mr Duck Steps Out...
"Dancing wasn't crucial to the Disney enterprise," writes author, Mindy Aloff, "but it was intrinsic to it. Bodies moving in periodic rhythms to music - either while executing choreographed dances, or while engaging in physical activities that verge on dance, or, occasionally while creating abstract designs (such as the surreal marching-and-floating-in-space patterns of the 'Pink Elephant' ballet in Dumbo) - were hallmarks of Disney's animated films..."
Well, you can judge for yourself because here is that elephant ballet that is a-sort-of-a-dance-even-though-it-is-not-quite-dancing...
In a foreword to the book, choreographer and director, Mark Morris explains why he includes Walt Disney on his list of influential choreographers alongside George Balanchine, Merce Cunningham and Busby Berkeley. "I marvel," he writes, "at the variety of choreographic invention and aptness. What a remarkable resource of whimsy, fantasy, art!"
Indeed, the sheer diversity of Disney dance is extraordinary: in one picture, Make Mine Music (1946), there is, among other things, a pas de deux from ballet stars, Riabouchinska and Lichine...
And this, accompanying a jazz number from Benny Goodman and his Orchestra...
Dance is often used in Disney films to convey moments of key emotion: Cinderella dancing with her Prince as the clock moves inexorably towards the midnight hour, Briar Rose dancing with woodland animals as she fantasies about meeting the man of her dreams, Belle dancing withe the Beast and so softening his bestial heart, but it just as often used as an integral part of the storytelling process as can be seen in this classic sequence from the last film to be personally supervised by Walt Disney - but released in 1967, a year after his death - The Jungle Book.
Just as the Disney animators had modeled Snow White on the movements of Marge Champion, so the artists working on The Jungle Book based the antics of of King Louie and Baloo on those of veteran jazzmen Louie Prima and Phil Harris...
No Disney film features quite as much dance as the 1940 feature, Fantasia. It is a masterpiece of animation and dance is part of the total expression of the film's visualisation of music and musicalisation of art and I have been thinking quite a lot about this movie lately as I am prepare to provide a new commentary on the film for it's Blu-ray DVD release next year.
In addition to the ballet of hippos, alligators and elephants executed to the music of 'The Dance of the Hours' and the gambolings on Mount Olympus and Bald Mountain in the sequences choreographed to Beethoven and Moussorgsky there is the exquisite sequence based on Tchaikovsky's 'Nutcracker Suite' which is presented as a succession of dances executed by fairies, fishes, flowers, snowflakes and - in a segment animated by Marge Champion's first husband, Art Babbitt - mushrooms...
"Dance and animation," writes John Canemaker in another of the book's forewords, "a pas de deaux choreographed in heaven." And that divine choreography is what Mindy Aloff has chronicled in this richly-textured book.
