by Lucy Vurucic Riner

There are not many things, about dance, that I am “old school” about.  I don’t have the old school teacher mentality when it comes to many things in my classroom.  Although we require our students to wear leotards, I have not put one on in about five years.  And when it comes to instruction I am 90% positive feedback and 10% mean in the “old school” sense.  The one old school thing about me is that I love my bare feet.  I don’t understand how, or really why, anyone would want to dance any other way?  How else can you be completely connected to the ground if you can’t truly feel it?

Don’t get me wrong, I have plenty of modern dance friends that don’t love that skin to floor contact as much as I do.  And with contemporary dance becoming increasingly more popular (I’m still not really sure how to define it myself) it seems that the minute we realized that people like Petronio and Naharin were letting their dancers wear socks, many of us modern dancers jumped at the chance of creating pieces where socks were the obvious choice as part of the costume.  And while Ruth St. Denis and Doris Humphrey roll over in their graves every time one of us modern dancers puts on her socks or toe thongs (what an ingenious invention) we continue to find new ways to adorn our feet while we dance. [Read more…]