#dance steps

"As easy as 1-2-3 … a step by step guide to dancing the Charleston. As the dances got wilder, so did young people's morals – between 1914 and 1929, the divorce rate doubled in America, and pre-marital sex was rising too."

Dance Steps

Something I drew a while ago, but decided to post it since I don't really have anything else to post or make...

I was inspired with the ballroom scene in Disney's Beauty and the Beast and the song, "L-O-V-E" by Nat King Cole came to mind when I remembered scenes from Walt Disney's the Parent Trap (1998) at the beginning. Somehow it just seems to fit.

What are they doing?

As far as I can get out of my brain... Wally is teaching Opal how to dance to help her find fun in life...?

Andy Warhol

March 12, 2019

Jack Mackie’s artwork, “Dance Steps on Broadway,” is embedded in the concrete. This particular iteration, the Tango, is actually one of a nine-part series of cast bronze footprints dispersed along 12 blocks of this busy thoroughfare. Each is a numbered diagram of a dance—tango, waltz, cha-cha.

There’s even a dance Mackie invented: He calls it the "bus stop."

“It’s kind of mirroring the traditional dance pedestrians do waiting for a bus,” Mackie explains. He demonstrates the steps. “Backing up, looking out at the street. Step out, step back, then say ‘the bus isn’t coming, so I’ll just walk.’”

“Dance Steps on Broadway” is one of the first public art projects funded by Seattle’s Percent for Art Ordinance. The law, enacted in 1973, mandates that 1 percent of the budgets of certain city capital projects be set aside for artworks at those projects.

Seattle had an array of art in public places before the ordinance, but primarily they were statues of important historical figures, or discreet sculptures donated by private collectors. The public art ordinance’s authors were inspired by a grander idea—to weave art and design into the city’s infrastructure projects.