Tired of wasting your time in New York's Chinatown gulping down noodles and getting three I ♥ NY shirts for $10? Turn up your budget one notch, and check out Swing Fridays at Grand Harmony Palace on Mott Street.
Cover is $15 and includes live music until midnight. Food and the full bar are available but aren't included. Fear not, first-timers: Lessons are on the house at 9 pm.
Upcoming weekends will feature Michael Arenella and the Dreamland Orchestra as well as George Gee and the Jump, Jivin' Wailers. Totally reminds us of that scene in "Swingers" when Jon Favreau dances with Heather Graham. But, you know, in Chinatown instead of Hollywood.
Ballet=boring, right? What if the dances were set to Big Boi tracks instead of snoozy classical music? You'll find it at the Atlanta Ballet, starting tonight.
The show's called "Big," and it's a seriously limited engagement. The dancing is all professional ballet, but Big Boi, the hip hop group Konkrete and others will provide the tunes live.
It's a little cheeky, sure, but there's nothing wrong with appealing to a younger audience. As choreographer Lauri Stallings says:
Embedded Travel Guides: We are searching the world for folks who can take you on a field trip of their "backyard." When we find these folks, we then stealthy embed them into their local travel scene and ask them to be our eyes and ears out in the field.
We are expecting the same sort of grainy video, choppy sentences, and snapshot photos that you are use to seeing from embeds. The rub is, at the end of the day we should be left with a backyard travel guidebook like no other.
If you've heard anything about Buenos Aires, you've probably heard something about Palermo Viejo. This quiet, mazy, cobblestoned neighbourhood to the north of the centre has been extremely made over since the late 1990s, and is now the city's most fashionable district for dining, shopping, sleeping in style, or just hanging around on street corners looking fly.
Embedded Travel Guides: We are searching the world for folks who can take you on a field trip of their "backyard." When we find these folks, we then stealthy embed them into their local travel scene and ask them to be our eyes and ears out in the field.
We are expecting the same sort of grainy video, choppy sentences, and snapshot photos that you are use to seeing from embeds. The rub is, at the end of the day we should be left with a backyard travel guidebook like no other.
Every couple of years, give or take, I tell my wife to put on her dancing shoes and I take her to one of BA's many spiffy discotheques where we have an absolutely marvelous time, um, tearing up the dance floor to the fat beats mashed up by the disk jockey in his booth. Last night, after noticing the year had an odd number in it, we did just that. We attended a nightclub.
This Saturday, two activities will merge like they should've ages ago. In fact, they're our three-year-old niece's two favorite activities -- dancing and parades. New York's First Annual Dance Parade kicks off May 19 at 1 p.m. The parade and festival are in the same free-for-all, fun-loving spirit as other New York institutions like Art Parade and Burning Man. Attendees will pirouette, tap, and shimmy down Broadway from 32nd Street to 13th Street.
Sure, parades have always had their fair share of dancing. But Dance Parade doesn't discriminate by genre (or even skill level). Plus, it's the end-all purpose of the event. Forget about your silly national pride or charity cause, Dance Parade is just a few thousand friends getting down.
We don't mention dancing enough here: apart from the occasional reference to the well-known bird flu dance, we don't get those hips swinging often enough. So here's our dance tip for the week: Samba City in Rio de Janeiro is there to educate tourists about the way of the samba. It's open 5 days a week (in fact, every day except those starting with T!) and you can watch samba dancers and traditional drummers or even learn some steps yourself.
Disneyland-style, an 8 p.m. parade finishes the day, including fireworks and the opportunity for visitors to get involved in the festivities too. In fact, they bill it as a year-round version of Carnival. It's a government-sponsored project with a secondary purpose: many samba schools of the city are based there and prepare year round for Carnival in a facility known as the Sambodrome!
Originally advertised to open some three years ago, the bosses must have been samba-ing their time away instead of working, but Samba City finally got up and running last year. If you can't stay away from a place with a name as cool as the Sambodrome or you just feel the urge to get those feet moving, check out Samba City for an experience of Carnival without the hefty hotel price hikes.
Why do the Monkey or the Swim when you can do the Bird Flu Dance? After news of a Bird Flu outbreak was reported in the Ivory Coast yesterday, a local DJ invented a dance craze in response. DJ Lewis hopes that the dance will lighten the mood of the country, of course, but it's also meant to "chase away fear--the fear of eating chicken".
We'll bite, so to speak, and accept as truth that the bird flu dance epidemic (Sorry--too soon?) will chase away those poultry blues. So far, the dance is popular in Ivory Coast's main city of Abidjan. When it replaces the Macarena at soccer games, we'll believe in its power. Until then, we're sticking with the robot.
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by pbb
