Choreographer. Engineer. Nonbinary Ballroom Dancer
CURRENT CLASS SERIES:
Where: Urbanity Central Studio, 725 Harrison Ave, Boston.
When: 6-8pm on 11/1, 11/8, 11/15, 11/22
Sign up: https://docs.google.com/…/1R3MOi5zg-c…/edit
FAQs:
Do I need a partner? Nope!
Do I need to sign up for all four? Nope, the classes are drop-in.
Like, really free? Isn’t ballroom dance expensive? Yep, and yep! Your teachers are being supported by the LGBTQ+ Office in the City of Boston to offer this class series absolutely FREE
INSIDER BALLROOM: A FREE INTRODUCTORY LESSON
To know professional ballroom dancing is to know how to sell oneself: to the judges, to the spectators, and, more broadly, to the field: Dancesport. Having worked for each of the major American franchised schools, Holly and Michael are now recovering salespeople, seeking an alternative means of practice.
Insider Ballroom: A Free Introductory Lesson combines professional ballroom dancing of the “American Smooth” category with personal storytelling from the performers: Queer perspectives from their time spent inside this decidedly hetero-industry.
Your lesson experience includes a 35-minute presentation, followed by a chance to join Holly & Michael on the social dance floor. After this point, if anyone is interested in talking about the work, we can have a conversation. Just know that you are free to leave at any time (which, incidentally, both Holly and Michael wish someone had said to them during their own respective, free, introductory ballroom dancing lessons).
RECENT BALLET PROJECT: thequeenofnori.com
Professional ballroom dancer. Functionally it means one part therapist, one part personal trainer, and one part escort. As the franchise-sanctioned Benefit Sheets tell us, people come to American Ballroom for a wide variety of surface reasons: Making a Special Person Happy. Physical Activity. Business Reasons. Underneath all of those reasons is the sense that something is missing from their lives and paying $143/lesson grants them not only access to the ballroom and the community there, but is a salve for that existential pain.
My work as a solo artist, as well as part of a collaborative pair with fellow queer ballroom dancer Michael Winward, transmutes that existential pain into satire, commentary, and manifestations for queer joy. Now having left the mainstream ballroom industry to teach at Tufts and Boston University and freelance as a choreographer I explore queer perspectives on American Dancesport: an activity as spectacularly heteronormative as it is heteronormatively spectacular.
As a dancer and choreographer I am an American eclectic in the way of Gene Kelly or Fred Astaire–spouted in ballet but ripened in dance forms with Africanist roots. Years of running from the ballet barre to the salsa club allow me a voice and vocabulary that synthesizes line and shape with polyrhythm, asymmetry, and grounded feet. In all things partnering and relationships are at the center of my work, my gender-expansive and empathetic pedagogy serving as a balm to the crackling static of dysphoria I feel as a transmasc artist.
Current Work in Progress:
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