Male Dancers Wanted!

Jubilee is always interested in finding people to perform our male, or lead, parts.  Following are some reasons you might want to consider joining us:

Men:  Dance Like Everybody’s Watching

It’s fun to go out and let your hair down for an evening of social dancing, be it Lindy, zydeco, waltz or contra – you need do nothing more than shine up the old dancin’ shoes and head to one of the many Bay Area venues that offer your style of dance.  Performance dancing in front of an audience is another thing altogether – you need choreography, costumes of some sort, other dancers to work with, your own music, and hours and hours of rehearsal.  Weighing several hours of fun at a cost of shining your shoes versus spending hours with others rehearsing for maybe ten minutes of performance, it’s not surprising that most people – particularly men – opt for the former.

As a member of Jubilee American Dance Theatre – and a guy – I would argue that performance dancing offers a number of rewards you can’t get from a social dance, including collaborating with a group on a common goal, connecting with an audience through dance, and experiencing the pure joy of performance. 

·         Collaboration We had been performing at a folk festival in France, and frankly, our dancing was a little rough around the edges due to a lack of rehearsal time and having many new dancers in the group.  One stormy early evening, while doing a Cajun number in front of about a thousand people, there was a clap of thunder, the crackle of a transformer, and the arena was plunged into darkness.  Without missing a beat, our musicians – fortunately all acoustic – kept right on playing, and we just kept right on dancing through to the end, and, as they say - the crowd went wild!  From that moment on, our performances clicked, and we came together as a performing unit.

·         Connection One of our stops during last summer’s tour of Portugal was at a retirement home outside a small town. They treated us to a wonderful lunch and we “danced for our supper” by doing a series of square dances for the residents.  As our band played an opening number, you could see the old folks start to connect with the music – tapping their feet, nodding their heads, and within a minute or two of our group starting to dance, all of the attendants in their pink outfits joined in, mimicking our steps and promenading around the dance floor with us.  It was an afternoon those folks won’t soon forget – and neither will we.

·         Joy At the San Francisco Ethnic Dance Festival, we performed a dance suite based on the writings of Laura Ingalls Wilder, featuring lots of reels, waltzes and polkas. One of our newest male dancers, who has a swing dance background, was having to learn steps and movements quite out of his comfort zone, and it was clearly a challenge for him.  After the first show, in which he did quite well, I spotted him backstage, weeping.  Worried, I asked him what was the matter, and his quiet response was “I’m just so gosh darn happy.”

These are but a few of the rewards from dancing with a performance group.  As you might have picked up, Jubilee needs more male, or Lead, dancers.  We perform all manner of American folk dances – from squares to clogging, from polkas to swing, at schools, retirement homes and folk festivals in the Bay Area and around the world.  We rehearse most every Monday evening from 7:30 – 10:00 pm at Ashkenaz in Berkeley, and we offer a welcoming and diverse group of dancers who will go out of their way to work with you on learning our choreography and dance styles.  For more information, contact us at info@jubileedance.com.