More from The Spirit Moves

Here’s a long seqence of clips from the documentary on traditional jazz dancing, The Spirit Moves, hopefully to keep you occupied while I update this site a little less often being on the road for a while.  These are some segments from the documentary though some of the routines that were posted here before, there are quite a few that have not.

The seqeunce of clips in this excerpt: The Tranky Doo (Pepsi Bethel, the choreographer, is in the middle, flanked by Al Minns on his right and Leon James on his left), The California Routine performed by Leon James and Esther Washington (which forms the basis of the group segment of Hellzapoppin), Frankie & Willamae doing a demo with aerials (the first being “Over the Back” which was the first aerial to be invented), the Big Apple (different ending from Frankie’s version in the movie Keep Punching shown in the 9th Sept 2008 entry), and some practice footage of dancing inside The Savoy Ballroom (the sequence beginning 7:52 is what they called “Stops” – choreographed sequences which people knew, if I am not mistaken, first done by Frankie, as inspired by Jimmie Lunceford’s song “Posin”).

Do check out the 28th Nov 2008 entry for more from the documentary.