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BALLROOM DANCING: It’s Transformation to Olympic Sport
BALLROOM DANCING
It’s Transformation to Olympic Sport
GRAPHIC: "One Body, Four Legs" by Dr. Caroline (Kay) Picart (c) 2005 Dancing has captivated human beings from the dawn of time: Its artistry, its beauty, its allure.
But how did dance evolve from a weekend experience to an Olympic sport event?
Conducting interviews on this subject is Caroline “Kay” Joan S. Picart, English professor by day and Ballroom Dance Sport Spectacle by night.
During your interview with Kay Picart, your audience will be enthralled with her every word as she paints the poetic story of the transformation of Ballroom Dancing to Olympic Sport.
Kay is the author of many books, including her latest, “From Ballroom to DanceSport: Aesthetics, Athletics, and Body Culture.”
To watch Kay dance, go to:
http://www.csit.fsu.edu/~erlebach/movies/kay1.html
ABOUT KAY...
Caroline “Kay” Joan S. Picart captured second place at the 2005 United States DanceSport Championships in the World Pro Am Cabaret Champion category, as well as second place at the Millennium National Pro Am Cabaret Championship. When not dancing, Kay (as she prefers to be called) is Associate Professor of English and Courtesy Associate Professor of Law at Florida State University, and is the author of many books, including Remaking the Frankenstein Myth on Film: Between Laughter and Horror, also published by SUNY Press, and Inside Notes from the Outside.
ABOUT THE BOOK...
From Ballroom to DanceSport
Aesthetics, Athletics, and Body Culture
Caroline “Kay” Joan S. Picart
An insider explores the transformation of ballroom dance into an Olympic sport.
Drawing on recent media portrayals and her own experience, author and dancer Caroline Joan S. Picart explores ballroom dancing and its more “sporty” equivalent, DanceSport, suggesting that they are reflective of larger social, political, and cultural tensions. The past several years have seen a resurgence in the popularity of ballroom dance as well as an increasing international anxiety over how and whether to transform ballroom into an Olympic sport.
Writing as a participant-critic, Picart suggests that both are crucial sites where bodies are packaged as racialized, sexualized, nationalized, and classed objects. In addition, Picart argues, as the choreography, costuming, and genre of ballroom and DanceSport continue to evolve, these theatrical productions are aestheticized and constructed to encourage commercial appeal, using the narrative frame of the competitive melodrama to heighten audience interest.
“I began this book with but a cursory understanding of ballroom dance and a strong understanding of things rhetorical; I ended it with a deep appreciation of the art of ballroom dancing and admiration for the author’s deployment of contemporary critical theory.” — David Frank, University of Oregon
“This book on the politics, aesthetics, and cultural underpinnings of ballroom dancing and DanceSport is written by someone who participates in both, and this lends an immediacy and authority to the author. Picart is able to provide a very thoughtful and subtle analysis of how society positions itself on the transformation of an art form into a sport.” — Adrian Del Caro, University of Colorado
“Exceptional, remarkable, unique, very well researched, and comprehensible! Picart’s book, From Ballroom to DanceSport, examines the increasing popularity of ballroom and cabaret dancing and the myriad of issues and forces involved internationally in the quest (and debate) for inclusion in the Olympics as dancesport. This book is a ‘must’ read for all students of dance, amateur and professional dancers, those involved in dance media, dance organizations, and all who enjoy social dancing.” — Jessie Lovano-Kerr, Florida State University
To visit Kay’s web site that features her art business, Kinaesthetics, go to:
http://www.kinaestheticssportasart.com/
EXTENDED BIOGRAPHY OF KAY PICART:
Dr. Caroline Joan (Kay) Picart is currently an Associate Professor of English and Courtesy Associate Professor of Law at Florida State University. She is a philosopher and former molecular embryologist educated in the Philippines (B.S. biology, magna cum laude and M.A., with honors, in philosophy at the Ateneo de Manila University), England (M.Phil., Sir Run Run Shaw Scholar and Wolfson Prize Winner, history and philosophy of science, Cambridge University), and the United Stats (Ph.D., with honors, philosophy, with doctoral minors in comparative literature, and aesthetics and criticism, The Pennsylvania State University).
She is the author of Resentment and “the Feminine” in Nietzsche’s Politico-Aesthetics (Penn State University Press, 1999); The Cinematic Rebirths of Frankenstein: Universal, Hammer and Beyond (Praeger, 2001); coauthored with Frank Smoot and Jayne Blodgett, The Frankenstein Film Sourcebook (Greenwood, 2001); Remaking the Frankenstein Myth on Film: Between Horror and Laughter (State University of New York Press, 2003); the Holocaust Film Sourcebook 2 Volumes (Praeger, 2004), and Inside Notes from the Outside (Lexington Books/Rowman and Littlefield, 2004). Recent projects include: From Ballroom to DanceSport: Aesthetics, Athletics and Body Culture (State University of New York Press, advance release, December 2005); Inside Edge: Creating Ballroom Champions (Under Review, University Press of Florida); Images and Words, Words as Images: Updating Visual Culture Studies (Under Review, Oxford University Press); and with Cecil Greek, a co-edited anthology on images of the gothic in relation to representations of crime and violence in film and media (Under Review with Illinois University Press). She has published articles in film criticism, criminology, autoethnography, law, criminology, social and political philosophy, aesthetics, feminism and philosophy, philosophy/sociology of science, and phenomenology, as well as more than eighty popular pieces on Philippine art and culture as a columnist in various Korean and U.S. newspapers and magazines.
Most recently, her work in autoethnography, visual art, and dance have resulted in several videos that have been funded by grants from the Institute of Race and Ethnicity, University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire, St. Lawrence University, Swarthmore College, and with the technical assistance of the Office of Distributed and Distance Learning, Florida State University. She was trained in ballet, Hawaiian dance, and Philippine folk dance for fifteen years, and has been a student of ballroom since 1990. She developed a radio program, Ballroom Dancing with a Twist, which is currently being streamed over the internet, in collaboration with RadioTVFilipino Network, based in Boca Raton via: http://www.radiotvphilippines.net/radio.htm.
Her most recent dance-related accomplishments are: winning second place in the Millennium DanceSport Nationals in pro am cabaret dancing in June 2005, and capturing second place, with a different partner, in the U.S. Open to the Worlds pro am cabaret competition in September 2005, where 40 countries participated and the very best in the world competed. She is also a visual artist who has exhibited in the Philippines, South Korea and various parts of the U.S., and has started an art business, Kinaesthetics.
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