Customer Reviews

Glamour Addiction: Inside the American Ballroom Dance Industry

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

I disagreed with some of the author's ideas, but I'm giving the book five stars anyway, because I enjoyed how thought-provoking it was. The part that I disagreed with particularly was in how much dance is an addiction. It's true, we dancers spend a lot of money and a lot of time on our hobby. In my case, if I have spare time and spare money, it's going into dance lessons and costumes. But I have a friend who is a golfer, and his spare time and money goes into golfing. Same with my bridge-playing friend, who travels to tournaments all over the world. And how about my mathematician friend who loves numbers so much that he went deeply into debt to get a PhD in mathematics? Today he loves his numbers so much that if it were a question of a hot date or an evening with his equations, I think the hot date would win out, but I can't be sure. Are these people addicted? Or is it more simply that in a capitalist economy, people have more spare time and more spare money than ever before, and they're going to spend these resources in the ways that give them the most pleasure?

Anyway, I loved the book. It was thought-provoking as well as full of new information.

This was a great very current book. It had in it current dancers from "Dancing with the Stars" that has everyone now interested in ballroom dancing. It was great to konw the history and the current goings on in ball room

While this book is academic and a bit slow at times, I found it to be overall a very worthwhile read. As someone who was briefly a ballroom dancer, I found McMains book to be deliciously insightful. As she describes it, the DanceSport industry is kept alive by the allure of Glamour. Professionals and amateurs alike are drawn to the high-class glamorous ideal that ballroom portrays, and rather than fulfilling their desires, the industry just creates the need to invest more time, money, and energy to the pursuit. The DanceSport system seems to succeed not by making people happier, but rather by emotionally manipulating them and promising that fulfillment and happiness are waiting for them at just the next step (after taking one more class, one more private lesson, one more competition). In telling this story she describes the mix of people drawn to DanceSport and the challenges and exploitative situations they are faced with. She also gives a fascinating history of social dancing, and how it was slowly and often intentionally modified to fit the needs of a competition based industry (when reading the table of contents I assumed this chapter would be one of the dullest, but it ended up being one of the best). McMains also investigates the portrayal of "Latinness" in DanceSport, and convincingly argues that performances are racially charged and in many ways a form of "brownface." She also examines the portrayal of gender and heterosexual courtship, and wonders why such rigid roles are assumed to be an inherent and unchangeable part of the sport. But the book is not merely a laundry list of grievances against the ballroom dance industry. McMains is sensitive to multiple sides of each issue, and it is clear that despite everything, she loves ballroom dance (she was a competitor herself) and has faith in its good qualities. It was a very rewarding read.

I would go so far as to say prejudiced. As a devoted ballroom student for 10 years, I was happy to see any more-or-less mainstream book that treated ballroom dancing as something other than a fad, but only the glamorous cover photo of Jonathan Roberts and Anna Trebunskaya has lasting value for me. ... Evidently the author was so disillusioned by her experience as a professional ballroom dancer that she was unable to approach the subject with any objectivity. Her reliance on anecdotal "evidence" presented through composite characters is sloppy research; no broad studies or even surveys are presented. ... Numerous minor errors of fact and occasionally careless editing throughout, but the book's great flaw is that it looks - as apparently did the author during her dancing career - to ballroom dancing to provide, for its practitioners, all that is good in life - and then blames the sport for failing to do so. Those who go into ballroom dancing looking for a little glamour are, in my view, to be applauded; there is precious little glamour available to most of us in our daily lives. That in addition to being a popular social activity it is also a viable worldwide sport shows that a lot of people are indeed getting what they want out of dancing. The author should have talked to some of them.

After going to a few DanceSport competitions in Australia and watching West Coast Swing competition on DVD I came to similar conclusions as the author of this book. While dance schools in Australia are not in my experience anywhere near as cynical and manipulative as those in the USA, Dancesport itself suffers from many of the same failings. Dancesport takes itself way too seriously. From the overdone fake tans to the grotesque caricatures of emotion ("face acting") to the hugely expensive costuming to the greased back hair and the parents whose egos are invested in their child winning, it is all a bit much. WCS seems to have more of a sense of humour, the costuming is more accessible and there is greater emphasis on actual dance skills in terms of partnering and musicality. And WCS competitors actually seem to genuinely enjoy dancing. So few Dancesport competitors seem to enjoy social dancing that you have to wonder why they bother dancing at all! Having said that, Dancesport does deliver some benefits: teenager competitors have a poise, style and standard of grooming and behavior that will benefit them in other areas of their lives, for example. My one criticism of this book would be its references to cultural theory (e.g. the discussion of 'the grotesque')which to me seems to be a vacuous ideology disguising its lack of any conceptual depth with fancy words. Ironically culture theory is open to many of the same criticisms as Dancesport: all hat and no cattle, as they say in Texas!

I have been involved in Dancesport as an amateur for DECADES and in my opinion, most of the author's insights to the American (and English) dance industry are spot-on.

In each chapter, her writing starts off a bit stiff with master's-thesis-speak ("I will then define...") but it loosens up during the chapter, and her sentence structure is not as contorted as her introductions portend. She only uses a few of them-there new-fangled words, and you'll probably guess their general meaning from the context ("reify", "conflation"). It's not difficult reading, really; if you start to feel bogged down, just read quickly and then slow down for those passages with information you want to think about. For every sentence that smacks of high-academia, she makes several observations that are so well-put (and need to be said) that I found myself constantly reaching for my pencil to underline or write a note about something I was reading. (Her short dissertation on the "black butt" was particularly entertaining.)

Her critiques on race and gender go on too long and I lost interest after a while (and started to skim). Nevertheless, as with her examinations of the dance industry and its clientele, and the differences between social and competitive partner-dancing, I think that her observations are correct, even if I don't agree with all her conclusions (you do not have to be defensive about your social class to suggest that dancers projecting straight lines and well-articulated footwork are more attractive than dancers who hunch over and shuffle).

My own interest in this book was initially piqued by her exposition on the history of Dancesport Latin. She has the best summary of how we all came to `break on 2' that I have read. Except for the last few pages of the Introduction, and toward the end of her race-and-gender sections, I was absorbed with the writing, and read the entire book over a few consecutive evenings. Even the "Notes" contain useful and interesting information: have you never wondered who exactly made up the Cha Cha and Chá? Or where the Jive syllabus came from? Or where to find a good history of Salsa? This is a pretty good place to start.

And my own unsolicited advice to aspiring dance students: just stay away from contracts, package deals and discount cards with expiration dates, and you'll be fine. And do finish college or plumbing school.

I am a beginning dancer, and I just started taking group classes at an independent studio. The author of this book is right on the money when she talks about the high pressure tactics, and the somewhat less pressure tactics that the dance studios use to hook you into paying for private lessons. Many of the students I have talked to stated that they came for Arthur Murray and some of the chain studios because they REQUIRED you to take private lesson. This studio does not-thank God. However, they make it clear that they would like for you to do so. At the beginning or the end of the group class, they always mention to us: don't forget to take advantage of our special offer. That offer is that you get a free private one hour lesson. Obviously, they then state, and of course you are under no obligation to sign up for further private lessons-sure! What I have found very helpful-and it is sure a lot less expensive than paying for private lessons is this. When I take a group class for example on the waltz-I make sure before taking the class to purchase an instructional video for the waltz or whatever class I am taking. This is because I either don't remember what the instructor said or doing the week-I forget the steps and can look them up on the video. I would like to know what other dancers think of this-as an alternative to private lessons. I note that the author makes no mention of this in her extremely well written-and in my judgment accurate book-certainly in the way the studios market their product.

Competitive ballroom dancing producing a "machine" the author labels "Glamour" has been around a long time. The change in its name to DanceSport in the 1980s tokened the effects several influences were having on it. Mainly, the new name was taken to give more visibility to the movement for this competitive dancing to become an Olympic sport. A former DanceSport competitor and now an assistant professor in the U. of Washington's dance program, McMains relates how such dancing has developed an "identity crisis" in trying to keep its aspects of art, entertainment, sport, and business in balance. As many readers will know, competitive dancing TV shows have lately become highly popular. McMains not only goes into what is behind the changes over recent decades and the current popularity of DanceSport, but also from her own experiences, continuing interest in the field, and profiles of a number of leading competitive dancers gives readers an up-to-date, extensive picture of this longtime activity drawing passionate competitors and devotees which has recently burst into the arena of popular culture.

Surprisingly, in 2006, two different writers, Juliet McMains and Caroline Picart, have independently written two remarkable books with very similar themes. Each unearths how British Imperialism assimilated African forms, stripped them of their roots and disciplined them into the 'universalist' cultural expression, practiced today in the white male dominated 'industry' known as Dancesport. Each hopes that art might triumph to express a more egalitarian norm, one where women and people of color might be permitted greater freedom though both locate the barriers in class, race, and gender--that is money. To those who would scoff at their hope, I would tell the story of yet another dancer, the venerated agitator Emma Goldman, who, though asked to stop dancing at a social gathering when she was told of a comrade's death, reportedly responded: "If I can't dance, it is not my revolution!" For her, it was all about life and joy, the one fountain from which both artistic and political change flowed. Here, McMains and Picart keep that spirit alive.

Juliet McMains presents all of the negatives of the ballroom dance industry, and glosses over the positives. This is a book written by an academician for academics who want to find hidden meanings and ulterior motives in ballroom dance. Although she has lots of interesting theories and presents some good history of the industry, her viewpoint was biased to the extent that I wondered why she was so "sour."