"The Goddess of Go-Go"

"Now she lives alone in 'a wonderful house in Los Angeles' with her five cats and her dance studio next door. She still teaches students, judges street dance competitions globally and is regarded as a legend in the field. And she still hears Mickey echoing through the culture: in movies (most recently Die My Love), and in songs by the likes of Run DMC (It's Tricky), Gwen Stefani (Hollaback Girl), Taylor Swift (Shake It Off), Charli xcx (Speed Drive) and, most recently, Blackpink singer Ros'’s hit single with Bruno Mars, Apt. 'It's kind of an anthem now. Here in America, if you're a little cheerleader, you're dancing to it.'"

Steve Rose at The Guardian talks with Toni Basil.

"Avant-Garde DJ Really Gets The Dance Floor Thinking"

"'When that crazy-ass meditative soundscape dropped, everybody on the floor just started ruminating like wild,' said nightclub patron Lydia Wallace,"

From The Onion.

"Deserve a Little More Respect?"

"They are, in a sense, the exuberant everymen of the music world. What they do seems attainable to everyone in the crowd. Although that's certainly not to say they don’t take their craft seriously. 'You're not just bumbling around,' insists Dmochowski. 'I definitely thought I could add to the live experience, by expressing the music and the poetry, and make it much more dynamic and visual.'"

Chris Salmon at The Guardian praises the "great dancing mascots of pop."

"It's Hard to Overestimate the Social Earthquake"

"After a fanfare to build anticipation, the spotlight would hit a white baby grand piano slowly descending from the ceiling. Atop that piano was the statuesque Ms. Doda, in her mono-kini, proudly displaying her enhancements. She would dance and swivel her way through a few numbers before the piano ascended back to the ceiling, with Ms. Doda never leaving her perch."

Kevin Fagan and Sam Whiting in the San Francisco Chronicle reports the death of pioneering topless dancer Carol Doda.

Step in Cool Dirty Water Trixie

The Los Angeles Times runs obits for etiquette instructor Maxine Powell, poet Wanda Coleman, choreographer Marc Breaux, musician Chico Hamilton, actress Jane Kean, writer John Egerton, musician Dick Dodd, and televangelist Paul Crouch.

"A Necessary Facet of a Well-Lived and Open-Minded Life"

"Which meant that theirs was an image to emulate. Leotards, leg warmers, and rehearsal-room layering became seventies fashion statements, and on Seventh Avenue, stretch fabric came to the fore in wool, cotton, and new synthetics like Qiana. The message of all this, says dance historian Elizabeth Kendall, was to “relax and be a body. Pantyhose versus girdles. Physicalities were being reborn. Dance was the art in which the body woke up.” Ascendant design stars Geoffrey Beene and Halston created flowing dresses that had skinny belts much like the circle of elastic that dancers wore around their waists in morning class. In the sixties, life was a cabaret; in the seventies, A Chorus Line."

Laura Jacobs in City Journal considers dance in the 1970s.

"The Dreams of Poets Taken Seriously"

"While it took a Frenchman, Petipa, to make ballet Russian, it took a Russian, Balanchine, to make it American—the most unlikely transposition the art form has ever experienced. 'Classical ballet was everything America was against,' Homans explains. 'It was a lavish, aristocratic court art, a high—and hierarchical—elite art with no pretense to egalitarianism' designed 'to promote and glorify kings and czars.' Whose divine right would it promote in the land of the equal, the free, the duly (and unduly) elected? But as Balan­chine was fond of saying in the face of the impossible, or highly inadvisable, 'Nevertheless. . . .' And he proceeded to give American dancers an aristocracy all their own."

Toni Bentley reviews Jennifer Homans's Apollo's Angels: A History of Ballet in The New York Times.