Target; Disco Dancer (edited pix)
- Transcript
Okay, why don't we try your American hustle steps one more time? You step to the left with your left foot, touch with your right, step to the right with your right foot, touch with your left, then step down with your left foot and down with your right foot. Well, if you take out about four of those steps, I think you're going to have the dance down right. Good luck. Apparently, Karen Gourney is some type of a dancer when she looked at it and when she was dancing alone, she had this happy smile in her face and when she danced with John, she tended to grimace just a little bit around the edges and I kind of thought, well, if I had to dance with John, I think I'd grimace a bit too. He was acting like a dancer. Given the benefits he had, I thought he did an adequate job, but it was pretty obvious he certainly didn't have a dancer's body and he really couldn't be expected to do what a dancer should have done. So, just take the steps and
you're going to go to the right first. Like you always do, in four steps, you'll step right, two, three, touch, then walk left, two, three, four, five, five, five, five, five, five, five, five, five, five, five, I start training to me when I see people say that people have to go to discos look good because I see my class as Dancing under the worst of conditions sometimes in a little classroom, stuck with a tiny mine recompayer, and they have tremendous, there's a thrill art to dancing. Cross over, touch to the right, cross over, then just Step back with your left foot, and back with your right foot. I would say that I'm a fairly good ballad dancer, I'm pretty good ballad, and I'm considered one of the best at DiscoHot. If prizes are any indication or the number of wins I have, the number of professional clinics I am asked to instruct in, the number of places that will fly me and to teach, I would be considered one of the best.
People listen to classical music and say, you've heard one symphony, you've heard them all, largely inaccurate, so I think if you like the type of music that Disco represents, and if that's the kind of music that gives you satisfaction, then as much to be gotten from it is there's another kind. But it takes a different kind of appreciation than classical music picks. You can't look for motifs and themes repeating, and that's how you're going to get what you're going to get this great music to dance to, and that's what it's written for. It does a fantastically successful job at that. When I was young, I was not only scrawny, but I was extremely uncoordinated, so not all if they would let me say it was all the other reindeer as it were, but I was ostracized pretty generally, I was very homely and extremely unpopular, so what would you do? What would I do? Cry a lot, I don't know, I don't have the sad childhood
story. I had to go to something, and I went to a lot of movement, Dance Therapy helped a lot. I did therapy not for my psychological state, but I had fairly debilitating illness, which was taken care of, and to get me back on the track moving again I had Dance Therapist come in, and ever since then I've started dancing a lot. When you're done turning your foot is always back, that's right before. People get told all the time that they can't dance, and pretty soon they start believing it. I'm very clumsy, I trip and stumble all the time, and people come up and talk to me and they say, oh I'm taking a class to get coordinated and I just tell them good luck, because it hasn't helped me and I've been doing it for five years, and so I can't figure out what people do that, but it doesn't matter if you're clumsy, you can still look nice and polished on the dance floor. Let's try it when I actually turn on the same time that I do okay, even that, let's start based on that direction. One, two, three, okay now you turn.
By and large it's an advantage to be gay, just because you can dance in more contests, a lot of the judges are gay, and the performing arts have generally been regarded as a gay, stronghold, discourse, especially since disco originated in gay bar. So we have, well, we have a gay population in the country, I guess it sounds almost like the Masons for a while ago, but the gay population does kind of have one foot out because we start dancing a few years before everyone else. I think that too many people
reject this call it haven't become a symbol of this generation. It's more of a good tool for the sexuality that's kind of emerged in the 70s and become much more blatant than it was in the 60s. It's one thing to go naked, it's another to dress to kill and look for that one night standing and find it a disco every time you go down there.
- Series
- Target
- Episode
- Disco Dancer (edited pix)
- Producing Organization
- WHA-TV
- Contributing Organization
- PBS Wisconsin (Madison, Wisconsin)
- AAPB ID
- cpb-aacip-4bdae28ae2f
If you have more information about this item than what is given here, or if you have concerns about this record, we want to know! Contact us, indicating the AAPB ID (cpb-aacip-4bdae28ae2f).
- Description
- Episode Description
- A documentary about a disco dance teacher and his theory of disco.
- Created Date
- 1978
- Asset type
- Episode
- Media type
- Moving Image
- Duration
- 00:07:01:02
- Credits
-
-
Producing Organization:
WHA-TV
- AAPB Contributor Holdings
-
Wisconsin Public Television (WHA-TV)
Identifier: cpb-aacip-3647e8a1230 (Filename)
Format: 16mm film
If you have a copy of this asset and would like us to add it to our catalog, please contact us.
- Citations
- Chicago: “Target; Disco Dancer (edited pix),” 1978, PBS Wisconsin, American Archive of Public Broadcasting (GBH and the Library of Congress), Boston, MA and Washington, DC, accessed May 15, 2026, http://americanarchive.org/catalog/cpb-aacip-4bdae28ae2f.
- MLA: “Target; Disco Dancer (edited pix).” 1978. PBS Wisconsin, American Archive of Public Broadcasting (GBH and the Library of Congress), Boston, MA and Washington, DC. Web. May 15, 2026. <http://americanarchive.org/catalog/cpb-aacip-4bdae28ae2f>.
- APA: Target; Disco Dancer (edited pix). Boston, MA: PBS Wisconsin, American Archive of Public Broadcasting (GBH and the Library of Congress), Boston, MA and Washington, DC. Retrieved from http://americanarchive.org/catalog/cpb-aacip-4bdae28ae2f