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6 Introduction Entering the World of Ballroom I T I S T H E last night of the 2008 United States Dance Championships (USDC), and the most popular event is under way: the final of the Open to the World Professional Latin Championship. Six finalists dance the five dances that constitute every Latin competition: cha-cha, samba, rumba, paso doble, and jive.1 As the first dance ends, the crowd favorites, Riccardo Cocchi and Yulia Zagoruchenko, begin whizzing around the floor doing promenade runs to the fast-paced samba music with its heavy drum beat and complicated syncopation. They flirt with each other; they flirt with the audience; they smile and wink as they perform intricate movements in quick succession without missing a step. Their partnership is less than a year old, but both are experienced at engaging the crowd.2 As Yulia moves her long, slender legs, the movement of her dress accentuates their elegance and speed. The audience sits at tables around the edge of the floor or on stadium seating stacked up behind the front tables, or they stand wherever there is space. They are whistling, cheering, and calling out dancers’ names and competition numbers as the master of ceremonies encourages them with, “Who’s your favorite couple out there, ladies and gentlemen?” I am in a floor-side seat cheering and yelling with the rest of the crowd. As Ruud Vermeij3 notes in his advice book for Latin dancers, whereas theatrical dancers perform a role and thus “become the dance,” competition dancers perform as themselves, and their fans come to see them more than the dance.4 The audience has been anxious to see Riccardo and Yulia dance together, since they placed second a few months earlier at the Blackpool Dance Festival in England. Blackpool is the most prestigious and difficult competition in the world, and up to this point, Americans have rarely done this well.5 Color plate 1 shows the couple competing at USDC a year later, when they had moved up on the international stage by coming in first at Blackpool in the jive. The samba ends, and the men move their partners into new spots on the Introduction 7 floor. In the rumba, as with several Latin dances, couples do not progress around the floor, so competitors pick spots depending on the direction they will take and where they expect others to go. They try to maximize the chance that each judge will have a clear view of them for at least some of the time and that the audience will notice them too. Inexperienced competitors sometimes crowd the center of the floor because they want the judges to see them, but these experienced finalists spread out. As the music starts, the dancers alternate clinging to one another and turning away. Rumba is a slow, erotic dance; the mood is hot and heavy, and the Latin rhythms are languid. The women bend and hyperextend their legs as they twist and turn around their partners. They slide their feet along the floor toes first, transferring weight from leg to leg and settling their hips after each move to produce rumba’s emblematic rolling hip action. Dimitry Timokhin and Natalia Petrova, another new couple, are dancing for Russia, and the audience gives them a warm welcome. Dimitry and his previous partner, Karina Smirnoff, had made the finals at Blackpool. But when Karina became a regular on Dancing with the Stars, the popular ABC reality show, she no longer had time to compete. Dimitry’s new partner, Natalia, is one of the fastest women on the floor, and after the fourth dance, the dramatic paso doble, excitement builds with the jive. Jive is the most energetic of the dances, and its position at the end tests dancers’ stamina; these finalists have already danced several rounds. This is the most exciting part of the show, as the dancers kick and spin at breakneck speed. Women’s dresses bounce and swirl, their rhinestones flickering in the lights; men slide across the floor; and the audience gets louder. This crowd knows how difficult it is to reach the skill level displayed before them. In Latin dancing, the action portrays a world of swaggering men and “their” women. The dancers depict a man’s world where women are beautiful objects with the power to inflame a man’s passion but not to reject his demands. Women follow the men’s lead and often supplicate their bodies before them. Sometimes...

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