Select an Influential Commercial Dance Practitioner and Discuss How They Have Inspired You?

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Lauren McMillan Select an influential commercial dance practitioner and discuss how they have inspired you? A commercial dance practitioner that has always inspired me is Bob Fosse, his choreography is very different and stands out so people recognise where that specific movement has come from, for example his hand gestures, the use of turned in knees, sideways shuffling and rolled shoulders. According to these movements they were based on himself, the things he felt self-conscious about for example his baldness was the reason why his dancers wore hats and he wore white gloves because he didn’t like his hands. Bob Fosse was born as ‘Robert Louis Fosse’ in Chicago on June 23, 1927. He began performing at a young age and when he got to his teens he went to his first ballet school, but he was the only boy that was enrolled. When he was there, outside the school he met another young dancer ‘Charles Grasser’ and they set up a duo which they called themselves the Riff brothers making $100 a week. By the time he was fifteen he had choreographed his first piece with four girls. All this really inspired me because he started choreographing at such a young age, and was very ambitious, but he was good at it ‘he was as much an artist as Nijinsky, Balanchine, or DeMille.’ This shows that he was just as famous and successful as them. Also it shows that you don’t have to be a perfect ballerina or have perfect technique to become such a successful choreographer, as Fosse had sway back knees which is why in a lot of his choreography he uses turned in knees to exaggerate his technique, but it’s made to look effective. For example, in his piece ‘Steam Heat’ his dancers are wearing black suits, derby hats and white gloves, which are used in this choreography because of specific movement. ‘to this day , “Steam Heat,” Fosse’s first piece of choreography for Broadway, remains one of

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