Final Feature Piece

Ten years ago Tesha Buss was a cat in “CATS.”  She performed in the show for nearly two years, and every night anticipated the top of the second act, when the stage was dark, and the cast would sit still around Old Deuteronomy (an important CAT) as he sang a song called “Moments of Happiness.”             

For Tesha, this mid-performance ritual represented a reprieve from her otherwise hectic life.             

“It forced you to sit down and be quiet, just after you’d danced so crazily before,” she says.  “I’d have this moment of, oh right—everything is okay—I’m on Broadway.”           

Tesha is a 33-year-old retiree.  She is one of a vast number of dancers termed “transitioned” within the dance community.  To transition is to quit performance and pursue a second career.   Dancers, unlike other artists, employ a time-sensitive instrument: at a certain age, the body can no longer perform the way the form demands.  For an overwhelming majority of dancers transition is inevitable.             

Final Slideshow

–is unfortunately a Soundslides slideshow, so can’t post up.  So in lieu of having the audio/visual combination here, I’ve collected some of my favorite photos from the slideshow.  These photos are all  video stills; they’re from Karin’s “Swan Song” performance that I wrote about below, in which she “handed down” an old favorite rotine to her young protege Kathy Callahan.  Because they are taken from video the quality isn’t stellar– there’s quite a bit of intricate movement, hands and arms and feet, in tap dancing, and that means blurriness when you try to freeze the frame.  But I actually like it in these pictures.  There’s so much energy in the stills, and Karin and Kathy look so happy.  It was nice to use these images to illustrate the audio of Karin talking about passing down choreography, and tradition in dance.  Below, images of Karin and Kathy performing together an Ernest Carlos routine that Karin says “changed her life” when she first learned it, at age 10.

  

Final Video

GNews final video embedded below:

 

Thanks!

Second Slideshow

Made in iMovie and uploaded to YouTube.  Embedded below:

 

 

Thanks!