One of my Favorite Swing Dance Pieces

Jan 15, 2007 in videos, friends, Education, Dance, swing dance, Entertainment, cool stuff, School, life, art, Relationships, fun, blogging

I’m a lover of Swing Dance. My first love was Lindy, but West Coast has really stolen my heart. However, I will never forget some of the great memories I’ve had with Lindy. My first dance teacher, Denise Gibson, has gotten hip with the times. She’s posting videos of some of the dances she’s put together over the year on youtube.

About 9 months prior to the release of The Pink Panter starring Steve Martin, the Moorpark College Swing Dance Club performed a routine to the Pink Panther Theme. Denise and I choreographed the piece together, and it is one of my favorite pieces I ever did with the MCSDC.

YouTube - Pink Panther

technorati tags:swing dance, moorpark college, lindy, west coast, teachers, education, college, fun, entertainment, school, friends, relationships, videos, youtube, dance

The Future of the Web

Feb 3, 2007 in culture, friends, thoughts, videos, myspace, swing dance, Dance, Entertainment, cool stuff, Work, life, blogging, art, Relationships, photos, fun, technology

I love open source. I love the idea. I love the practice.

The concept of open source software is pretty simple. The community freely, openly develops software, each individual collaborating and contributing to others in the community. The result… It’s the future on the Internet.

My former swing dance partner (Denise Gibson) wanted to create a website for her students. She teach swing dance, ballroom, swing dance, and other styles of dance at local colleges and studios. She wanted to provide them with a web experience where they could bond as a community, communicate with each other, meet new people, and enjoy a multimedia arrangement of dance information.

I wasn’t sure where to start. It’s been a while since I was out of the IT game. Of course, it never occurred to me to develop a website for her based on ASP.net or any Windoze platform for that matter. So, I played around with the applications available through my godaddy.com hosting service.

WOW! What a selection!

I stumbled across an application called Joomla. Mind you, by this time, I had evaluated Xoops, Geeklog, Serendipity, and a slew of others. Something about Joomla just really kept me interested. Sure, it has one ridiculous flaw in the fact that an article can only be placed into a single section+category. Hell, they should have talked to me about my infamous name/value pair class I developed back in the days of the psychic chat network. Those were the good ol‘ days, but I digress.

Joomla is as extensible as you can get. Build a community, host discussion boards, member managed blogging, private messaging, newsletters, AJAX shout boxes, eCards, contact management… The list goes on forever, literally. People in the Open Source community are developing tons of projects for Joomla every week.

In a matter of weeks, I developed a community website that had many of the same features as Myspace (minus the abundance of bugs). Granted, denisegibson.com does not have 11 million members, but that’s besides the point. I encourage anyone to test out Denise’s website. Even if you don’t know anything about dance, take a look and see what is possible in just a matter of days with open source software. Who knows… You might just find yourself picking up a pair of dance shoes after all!

Folks, this is where the web is going: community building websites with multimedia entertainment, newsletters, cool features. And it’s all going to be free!!!

www.denisegibson.com - DeniseGibson.com

technorati tags:dance, swing dance, college, dance partner, fun, art, life, culture, thoughts, friends, relationships, partnership, entertainment, work, technology, blogging, videos, myspace, photos, discussion boards, community, cool stuff, future, web, Internet, students, ballroom, dance studio, open source, collaboration, software, contribution

My First (and only) West Coast Swing Dance Choreography

Originally posted Jan 26, 2007 on my Wordpress blog in videos, friends, Education, Dance, swing dance, Entertainment, cool stuff, School, art, Relationships, fun, life

It is Fall 2005. I’ve been teaching swing dance with Denise Gibson at Moorpark College for a couple of semester. We both love West Coast Swing. We’ve been taking lessons from the world famous Sonny Watson, and we’d both love to bring it more exposure in the college community.

We start teaching beginning West Coast Swing to a beginning ballroom class. Now, for those of you who know anything about West Coast Swing, it is not as easy or simple as some of the other forms of swing. When it is done right, West Coast Swing is the coolest looking dance on the planet. Period.

West Coast Swing, however, is not an easy dance to learn. Nor is it an easy dance to teach, let alone to beginners. Denise and I are doing our best to prepare the students at Moorpark for a 6 week master class in West Coast Swing with Sonny Watson. When Sonny arrives, the students are excited! They are doing a great job. They are struggling but making excellent progress!

Next thing you know, the six weeks are over, Sonny is finished, and the beginning dancers now have 8 weeks to prepare for the dance concert at the end of the semester! Here is the result:

Remember! These are all beginning dancers. Some of these people have never danced a day in their life before this class. Some, this is their very first partnered dance class. For all but a handful, this is the first time they ever heard of West Coast Swing Dance. One semester! Look how clean they are. I’m so proud of how well they all did

technorati tags:west coast swing, swing dance, life, fun, school, Moorpark College, friends, art, education, relationships, videos, youtube, dance, college, stage, performance, entertainment