Tag Archives: Dance

How to Source the Perfect Jazz Songs for Dance Class

If you are anything like me, you are constantly searching for new music. I perk up when I hear a good track in a film, while I’m shopping, and I find myself scribbling down artist names when my friends DJ for me in the car.

While I love discovering new artists and fun new jams, I am mostly trying to keep my playlist both current and appropriate for my students.

The hardest part about building a playlist is finding music that has variety and is catchy without being vulgar, suggestive, or laden with curse words.  Get the clean version you say?  In my experience sometimes the clean version simply swaps out one expletive for another that is somehow considered less offensive.

Having been a full time teacher for several years, I have found a formula in finding jazz songs for dance class and creating some killer playlists.

Here are some of my best tips and tricks to find jazz songs, and create a great playlist.

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Why I Love to Play Around in the Dance Studio

Yesterday I had the joy of walking into an empty dance studio with my good friend Charlotte. We had the intent of playing around with movement ideas and creating anything just because.

Neither of us had a deadline, an upcoming performance, a submission, or a specific idea burning to be created.  We simply got together and started moving and catching up on life. Continue reading


How Teaching Reframed My View of My Body Image

I still distinctly remember trying on my very first recital costume when I was 5. I went crying to my mother because my thighs didn’t fit in the legs of the leotard and they were being squashed by the elastic.

Little did I know that this would be the first of many experiences I would have with my body being ‘wrong’ for dance.

I have spent my whole life in front of the mirror.

I started dancing when I was 4 years old and I absolutely fell in love with being in the studio and learning how to perform on stage. Continue reading


Dancing The Distance with Sasso & Company this April!

As with any artistic project, what you start out to create takes on a life of its own and turns into exactly what it is meant to be.

While the creative journey may take a different path than originally expected, I find that the destination generally remains the same.  It is what we discover along the journey that clarifies our true intentions. Continue reading


Call to Artists – Come Dance with Us in April

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Thank you for your interest in performing with Sasso & Company in our annual Spring Performance Series!

We are looking for established contemporary and modern dance artists from the Boston community to share an exciting variety of work with new and returning audiences. Sasso & Company aims to further the sense of connectivity in our local dance community through this collaborative performance opportunity. Continue reading


Protecting Choreography from Being Copied

On how to protect your choreography from being copied, an issue I have, unfortunately worried about as an artist:

““The technical moves themselves are like words for an author,” she says, and therefore are available for anyone to use… But, says Haye, “when you put a series of words together, they become paragraphs and therefore copyrightable.”

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What Are We Really Learning In Dance Classes?

I recently participated in a jazz class in London and was shocked to find out that it was a legitimate technique class!

Over the last several years, I have been overwhelmingly disappointed when I have gone to take professional level classes in various cities in the US and UK. My expectation is that I will receive a proper warm up that requires technical skill and finesse (i.e. plies, tendus, balances, etc) followed by a combination that is designed to be fun, challenging, and fits into the genre of the class.

Well, let me tell you about my experience:

So many classes that call themselves jazz or even modern are this new brand of contemporary that’s a bit of modern thrown in with a lot of acrobatics and scary tricks that look sort of cool, but will land most of us in the hospital with knee problems sooner rather than later.

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How to Leap 3,000 miles: Dancing the Distance

I naively thought that once I started my company and had a season, that things would sort of roll forward from there.

I would have an audition, gain some new dancers, create more work, and have more performances. I knew that it would always be hard work., even the big, established companies such as Paul Taylor Dance Company, continually seek to grow and engage audiences in new and innovative ways (hence the change to Paul Taylor’s American Modern Dance).

I am excited to pour myself into Sasso & Company, but I did not anticipate I would be directing my second season from across the Atlantic Ocean.

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Why You Can’t Stop Worrying When Creating a Self Funded Dance Show

I am all at once nervous and proud. In just a few short weeks, this dance show has come together. In September, when most companies are getting into their regular rehearsal schedule, I was contemplating if I would create anything at all. By December I was in the studio with two of my dancers creating a duet and experimenting with ideas surrounding love styles and Sternberg’s triangular love theory. As the work started coming together, I realized that I really wanted to produce a season and introduce my work as an independent choreographer and artistic director of LaceySassoDance/Sasso & Company.

Love in motion Dance show Continue reading


Moving from Popular Dance to Dance and Movement Therapy

This semester, I had the opportunity to blend my passion of dance and movement with my psychology training in a class called body-oriented psychotherapy. The class covered a variety of topics including somatic (ie body) methods from Feldenkrais and yoga, to foundations of dance therapy. We were given the opportunity to move and experience these methods weekly.

Dance and Movement Therapy Continue reading