OMG unbelievable. Thank you for sharing.
 
Interesting take on the bollywood aspect of ball room.
 
thanks again V
 

________________________________
 From: Vikram D <vg...@yahoo.co.uk>
To: "gaybom...@yahoogroups.com" <gaybom...@yahoogroups.com> 
Cc: "gay_bombay@yahoogroups.com" <gay_bombay@yahoogroups.com>; 
"movenp...@yahoogroups.com" <movenp...@yahoogroups.com> 
Sent: Wednesday, April 4, 2012 8:30 AM
Subject: g_b uplifting!
  

 
   
 
A wonderful clip - this is what Youtube exists for! It shows a long term gay 
couple who aren't afraid to show the depth of their love for each other by 
dancing on TV, in front of one of Britain's top shows. If this link doesn't 
work, just google Youtube and Sugar Dandies - you won't regret it: 
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B2xwhT8WhZU 

As a sidelight, and here I might be giving something away, but really you 
should have watched the clip, their ballroom dancing routine provides an 
interesting and moving answer to the question that's been asked - how do you 
make something that intrinsically assumes a difference between the sexes work 
when its same sex.  

The issue in ballroom dancing is that the man leads the woman. Yes, of course 
these roles can be reversed for effect, but the essential part of the dance is 
that you have one partner (usually male and taller) who in the dance dominates 
the other partner (usually female and smaller). So adapting it to a same sex 
couple is a problem which is a bit odd considering that ballroom dancing is 
such an intrinsically camp exercise.  

This has come up in those popular dance shows on TV like Dancing With the Stars 
where quite a few of the participants are gay, whether they admit it or not. 
Its caused awkwardness at times, but they usually just say that the dance 
requires a man and a woman and that's how it is whether the man and woman might 
want to sleep with each other or not. When Caz Bono was on Dancing With the 
Stars, they paired him with a woman of course, and it worked since he is so 
obviously a man now, even if he was not born that.  

I remember one of the professional dancers being asked how he would dance with 
another man, and he sort of blushed and stuttured and finally said the way to 
do it, without one dominating the other, would be for both to do the same 
routine side by side. This is rather a Bollywood idea and makes me wonder - 
what are the dance sequences from Bollywood where you have two men, or two 
women dancing side by side, which could be considered for same sex dancing 
purposes. The problem of course is that this replicated routine would get 
rather boring fast - ballroom dancing is about interaction between the dancers, 
not just doing the same as each other.  

When the two guys here started their routine I thought they were naturally 
following the one guy dominates routine because one of them is much taller than 
the other, so he started by leading and he's the one who picks the shorter guy 
up. But then at the end there's a twist and the shorter guy picks the taller 
guy up - and partly they manage this by the taller guy wrapping himself around 
the other guy in a really vulnerable way. It sounds silly when I describe it, 
but it works really well - there was something truly moving about that moment.  

Its also nice to see the support they get from one of the (male) judges when 
the other male judge, Simon Cowell, does his usual semi-sneering routine. You 
can hear the obviously loaded meaning - but it still sounds good - when he 
says: "I think its important that we are just equal sometimes... don't listen 
to him, I think its great that you both lift each other up."  

Vikram (who actually tried learning ballroom dancing once from one of his older 
gay friends, who is one of the most stylish people he knows and was one of the 
best ballroom dancers in Mumbai till his health forced him to stop).  





   
      

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