Showing posts with label dancing venuses. Show all posts
Showing posts with label dancing venuses. Show all posts

Flexible Venus 4: Scarlett Strallen




There is no doubt about the most striking and erotic poster on the London Underground at present: it is this one of Scarlett Strallen promoting the new revival of A Chorus Line.  It's not just the impossible angle of those extraordinary legs.  It's not just the muscle tone in those silky thighs.  Its the insouciant look in her eyes which seem to say: "Look I can stretch my legs like this and it's no effort whatsoever.  Imagine what else I can do!"  Indeed!




Thirty year old Scarlett Aimee Vaigncourt-Strallen has been a fixture of the London musical stage since she took the lead in Mary Poppins in 2005.  Her three sisters Saskia, Summer and Zizi are all actresses as well.  More alarmingly she is the niece of former stage school moppet and, later, Dr Who companion Bonnie Langford.

Splendid!


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Flexible Venus 2: Kristine Winder




We have had quite a few messages of appreciation regarding our ballet dancer post so, encouraged by S in Vancouver, we will be putting more of these ladies up over the next few weeks.




In fact we had a Skype video call from S only two nights ago where she had put on a blue leotard and legwarmers and gave us an impressive stretch routine across cyberspace. She had drunk nearly a bottle of Quail's Gate Dry Reisling earlier so was particularly flexible.  Most diverting!




So what more appropriate subject for our next dancer than the lovely Kristine Winder from Vancouver who appeared as Playboy's Playmate of the Month in October 1977.




Her original pictorial contained four ballet pictures but we have tracked down some more including some different shots which appeared in French Playboy.




Kristine had spent seventeen years doing up to five hours dance training a day but given the then lack of artistic opportunity in the British Columbia city (it's still a bit light on classical arts compared with Toronto and Montreal - the Vancouver Art Gallery collection is pitiful, for example) she ended up as a receptionist.




She still looked nicely limber when she posed, at the age of 21, for the magazine. It's not possible to find out who took these dance photos as her pictorial had no less than four photographers: Mario Casilli (centrefold), Arny Freytag, Ken Honey and Ken Marcus.




The whole sequence is really a paean to the erotic charge of legwarmers, which work visually for exactly the same reason as stockings do but have the extra tactile quality of ribbed wool.





At 5'6" Kristine would have been rather tall for a ballerina and her 34-24-34 figure would have been rather curvier than the norm but Triple P thinks she had perfect proportions and looks superb in these pictures.




Legwarmers can have a truncating effect on the limbs but Kristine had such long legs that she still manages to look elegant in hers.




Usually Playboy used their Playmates' real names but Kristine Winder is a pseudonym as she didn't want her father to find out she had posed for the magazine. Unfortunately he did, as a number of crank, heavy breathing calls were made to people called Winder in Vancouver, trying to seek her out, and the press got hold of the story.




Sadly, Playboy reported in this year's June edition that Kristine had died earlier this year at the comparatively young age of 57.  We are happy to celebrate her loveliness and dance-schooled elegance here.


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Flexible Venus 1: Dancer in a lilac tutu



Agent Triple P would never claim to be an aficionado of ballet, although he has attended a fair few in the company of ballet-loving ladies.  We have seen ballet in London, Berlin, Vancouver, Copenhagen, Vienna, Toronto, Hanoi and probably a few other places we have forgotten about.




Whilst Triple P can understand the appeal of ballet he remembers being rather surprised, on attending his first performance, at the amount of noise the dancers made when thumping hard on to the stage.  It took something away from the experience, which is why we think it works better on TV where you just get the music and no thumping!




Although we haven't gone out with any dancers per se we have known  some who have had dance training (quite a lot in several cases) and the thought of dancers has always held a certain erotic frisson for Triple P.  There are four things Triple P finds particularly alluring about dancers: the toned legs and slender figures (we appreciate a skinny girl),  the clothing, the physical poise and, last but by no means least, the demonstrable flexibility.




One girl we knew did regular jazz and tap classes to keep in shape and her legs, although pleasingly soft to the touch had this iron tone beneath the surface like silk riding over tungsten carbide.  Stroking her legs was a true pleasure, especially when she flexed her muscles and you could feel her underlying strength.



There are two attractive aspects of dance dress.  Firstly, the performance wear, which for classical ballet features that strangely attractive garment the tutu. This Russian dancer is wearing a fetching lilac example of the now almost ubiquitous Balanchine/Karinska Tutu whose softer profile was, nevertheless, radical when it first appeared in 1950 as an alternative to the stiffer wired "pancake" tutu.  The success of the tutu, which on reflection is, of course, an utterly ridiculous garment, relies on the emphasis it gives to the dancer's legs.




Dance practice wear tends to be an artfully created melange of all sorts of contrasting pieces of clothing which, nevertheless, needs to allow full movement whilst keeping the legs warm.  One of Triple P's lady friends had got the wearing of legwarmers, skirts, vests, short cardigans and scarfs down to a fine art.  There were so many items of clothing but all so skimpy that they barely made a costume in total.  Which, of course, is the real trick.



Properly trained dancers are usually easy to identify by the way they move, hold their bodies and even the way they stand. Girls who habitually stand with their feet in a "T" position have probably had a lot of ballet training.  Triple P finds this almost unconscious elegance very appealing.




This young lady has had classical training as she is able to go en pointe a technique which requires literally years of practice starting at the barre and great muscular strength (and not just in the legs).



Although the idea is to extend the line of the leg and make the feet look elegant in reality most ballet dancers have terrible feet; the rigours of going en pointe giving them calluses, bleeding toenails, bunions, bursitis and many other nasty ailments.  You have to suffer for art!



This sequence of pictures was recently sent to us by our particular friend S with whom we have been to several ballets in Canada.  A young lady who did a lot of ballet as a youngster she well knows the effort needed to look effortless!



Triple P confesses that every time he sees an attractive ballerina in a tutu his mind always turns to exciting thoughts of flexibility and minimal ballet clothes so this set of photos is most welcome!




Female dancers' flexibility is their most obvious source of erotic appeal, as our Russian girl exemplifies in this final splendid study, but we will look at flexibility and the erotic shortly.


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Venus Passing: Felicity Isabelle Colby 1946-2011

Flick in orbit


The choreographer who gave movement to many of Agent Triple P's adolescent fantasies, Flick Colby, has died at the age of 65.


Flick, centre front and the original group


Born in Hazleton, Pennsylvania in 1946 she moved to London after graduation and formed the Pan's People dance troupe in December 1966 with Dee Dee Wilde.  They first appeared on Top of the Pops in 1968 and were the resident dancers on the UK's top pop music show for the next eight years, performing, usually when an artist couldn't make it into the studio, because they were too American, for example.  





Colby stopped dancing in the group in 1971 to concentrate on the group's choreography.    The group split in April 1976 after their final Top of the Pops performance. Flick stayed with the show as choreographer until 1981 but eventually returned to the US.


Poetry.  In motion.


Other dancers in the group's names still resonate with British men of Agent Triple P's age: Babs, Louise, Ruth Andi and Agent Triple P's favourite, Cherry Gillespie, who joined as an elfin 17 year old in 1972, when original member Ruth left to start a family.




There was much criticism of the literal nature of Pan's People's choreography as it related to the lyrics of the songs, in those pre music video days, but Agent Triple P, and his particular school friends: Snout, Cess, Bean Kid, Jimbo etc, thought they were the pinnacle of terpsichorean talent.  Inthe early seventies when there was very little in the way of suitable lust objects and when short skirts had become an endangered species, just as we were registering girls for the first time, the esteem in which these scantily clad lovelies were held cannot be overestimated.


Flick's picture from the National Portrait Gallery collection


So, thank you Flick for all those jaunty and, latterly, quite raunchy routines.
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