The Intense Joy of Dancing: Sandra Cameron on Her Lifelong Passion for Ballroom
It’s understandable that Sandra Cameron, three-time U.S. (International style) professional national ballroom champion (1976, ’77, ’78), is “a little burnt out after 30 years of teaching.” Cameron has run the studio that bears her name with her husband Larry Schultz for 28 years. A few years ago, she began sculpting and painting in order to renew her “artistic dimension.” It’s odd how a new path can take us back to an old one— adding a new art form renewed her passion for dance and dancing. I suspect she never really lost it.
In August of this year, Cameron went back to her native Scotland for the first time in 15 years and back to the Stewart School of Dance, where 86-year-old ballet and tap teacher Miss Agnes and Miss Agnes’s 96-year-old Highland dance teacher sister Mrs. Haggerty still teach. It was Miss Agnes who coached a 15-year-old Sandra to a Scottish junior ballet championship. The love she bears for Miss Agnes is clear in her voice. “She was a wonderful teacher, she looked after every student” working with them at whatever level they could achieve.
There were no mirrors in the little studio, and Cameron believes, much as the early moderns did, that through her sensation, Miss Agnes taught her to bring “soul” to her dancing, something she admires particularly in ballerina Margot Fonteyn. “Why is that sense of soul not being shared in studios?” she asked Miss Agnes. “You can’t teach that,” was the reply. “You just have it, you had it.”
Like all dancers, Cameron’s body is a repository of movement memory. Demonstrating an Argentine tango movement for her husband, a light bulb went off. “It’s all here.” She points to her hip and upper leg, explaining that as she demonstrated turning her spinal column, she noticed that from the pelvis down, the spine rotated from the supporting leg, a position her ballet-trained body recognized. “Oh my God,” she thought, “that’s épaulement.” Describing her discovery, Cameron stands, and despite her pulled back muscle, places herself in second position and begins turning in her hip sockets. Pointing to her foot, she noted how it both anchored and responded to her hip motion and to the torque in her spine and shoulders. “The initiation of the movement, look it’s all in the foot.” She twists back and forth for a moment feeling the movement. “A great teacher of mine talked about rotation from the floor, from the supporting leg, not the shoulders. That’s fun to be able to relate [tango] to ballet,” she says sitting again. “Dance is all the same isn’t it?”
Watching her body re-experience its discovery it’s clear why she has returned to teaching and why she enjoys her current class, “Musicality, Lead and Follow.” Cameron is deeply interested in what makes a good dancer. She is equally clear that this may be different for new dancers than for accomplished practitioners. “Beginners,” she says “want to dance and move. They should have fun, play.” For new dancers the steps are everything. Without them, you sit on the side, with them, you set foot on the floor and dance. Cameron has devised an extensive, month-by-month syllabus for each dance the studio teaches assuring that students learn the steps and basics of ballroom movement allowing them to dance immediately and progress through the intermediate level.
But Cameron was tired of teaching steps and wanted to focus on musicality and subtle aspects of partnering. Her current class, a class she’s always wanted to teach, is, she says, most appropriate for the dancer who is “almost tired of learning steps,” and who is serious about wanting “to know more (about movement), to play with ideas” that she learned during her own training with “great national and world champions who changed” her understanding of dance. “I am finally playing around with all the stuff I’ve learned,” she exclaims. “In a way it’s a luxury to be teaching this.”
The course series—one dance per month—aims to develop a deeper understanding of how specific body practices enhance your dancing: musicality; how to use the spine; how to use plié as a source of energy for “gathering into partnering, helping the couple balance together” preparing “physically and musically, to move off into the next step on a certain beat.” Feet are a central focus—how to initiate movement from the foot by compressing the muscles in the leg using the four corners of the foot against the floor; how to feel movement through either the ball-middle-heel or vice versa; how to feel the floor when you begin to shift your weight; how to play with the music by allowing your feet to linger for a moment. “Ballroom is so much about the feet,” she says. “You can’t dance if you don’t know how they touch the floor.”
Balance is also addressed. Followers, (the traditional woman’s role), must be ready to move as soon as the leader, (the traditional male role), initiates movement. To do so, both must be balanced over their feet and understand where their partner’s weight is. Followers often balance on one foot, waiting to feel the transfer of movement that will send them off into space. But leaders can’t force an off-balance follower to move. “Even in competition you don’t complain if someone in the team is off balance; you support them, make them comfortable, then go where they are” and recover. In order to facilitate sensitivity, Cameron works on “a gentle, (and therefore more responsive), touch when holding one another.” This helps leaders initiate movement clearly and helps followers be so “receptive that they just move out, not needing to be pushed or shoved but inviting the (leader) to move with them.” A good ballroom dancer,” Cameron says, “can dance with anyone, at any level, and make that person feel great.”
Cameron tells followers “the leader can do no wrong. The leader can not make a mistake because if you’re a good follower, and follow no matter what he does, then it cannot be a mistake.” Equally, she “tells leaders that the follower can do no wrong. It is your job to make her look good. All you can do is initiate the movement and acknowledge where the [follower] arrives.” Cameron means the leader can only set the path of the movement; to try and muscle the follower to go where and how he imagines is bad dancing and ungentlemanly. Leaders must accept that a follower, by dint of will or inexperience, may do something unexpected. “If the follower can’t, or won’t, follow the leader, he can’t make her, he can’t stop her movement from propelling through space. He can only go with her movement and hopefully bring her back” to the phrase and to the rhythm. “ By listening with your body, you are truly partnering. [Dancing is about] the energy of coming together rather than pulling apart, pulling apart comes from not listening. When partners are in synch and your energies are flowing, it’s euphoric, you are like one, a four-legged creature, no one knows who’s leading. It’s joyous, powerful. The euphoria kept me going for a long time.”
Cameron vehemently opposes the idea that partnering in ballroom dance is sexist. People “don’t understand,” she says. “The knowledge they have is so wrong. That one partner has power over the other is an illusion; the follower can’t be forced to follow, following is a choice. Even if the leader does the best possible job, they can’t do anything if the follower doesn’t follow, except to follow the [bad] follower. Some women think men have magic wands and they’ll make it work, but it’s untrue. The skill of following with knowledge is so important; the follower has incredible responsibility. The harmony in ballroom dancing is that it’s collaborative. I’m an assertive woman and I was always an equal with my partners. I’m a great believer that gender doesn’t matter, a good dancer should be able to do both parts,” Cameron says. You shouldn’t see leader/follower, just two great dancers partnering. The follower part has more action, but leading is euphoric. When a partner listens to you, it’s sublime. Someone’s listening to you! They’re both fun.
Although Cameron was a champion, for many reasons she has mixed feelings about competitions, particularly the professional/amateur competitions that are the bread and butter of many studios. But she cheers ABC’s “Dancing With the Stars.”
“I think it’s wonderful. How can we complain about having 27 million Americans watch a ballroom show every Monday and Tuesday? Any exposure for ballroom dancing is good.” The show, like Cameron herself, “imparts that dancing is accessible, that anyone can do it if they want. The pros [on the show] are so well trained, and the training they do with the amateurs is awesome. What they manage to do with them in the time they have is nearly a miracle. And the contestants really try. I love these big guys, football players, dancing the quickstep. I see more men joining classes. ‘Dancing With the Stars’ can get a little over the top, but who cares! It’s ballroom dancing. [It’s what] I try to share—the intense joy I’ve felt my whole life as a dancer.”