Campus News - Classroom

Students dance in their great-grandparents’ footsteps.

Dancing is a Wisconsin tradition — its legs extend well beyond all the polkas, chicken dances, and jumping around that takes place at Camp Randall Stadium. In historic Lathrop Hall, thousands of stocking feet glide along the wood floors each year, as they have for decades, to the rhythms of the waltz, the tango, the fox trot, the cha cha, and the jitterbug.

Today, most students spend more time on their computers and less time moving their bodies, but little else has changed in the world of Dance 41: Ballroom Dancing, says instructor Vivian Tomlinson. He knows whereof he speaks: for the past thirty-two years, he has been teaching Madison-area adults and UW students how to boogie.

A native of Cape Town, South Africa, Tomlinson grew up in a household full of music and dance. With help from a scholarship, he went to the University of Cape Town to study ballet. He spent fifteen years with the university’s ballet troupe, until a friend convinced him to move to Madison to join the Wisconsin Ballet Company. When the company closed in the 1970s, Tomlinson taught noncredit, continuing education classes, instructing ballet and ballroom dancers of all ages and abilities. In 1975, he joined a dance program at UW-Madison that eighty years ago had become the first degree-granting program of its kind in the country.

In the course’s heyday, UW-Madison offered seventeen sections of ballroom dancing, but tighter budgets in recent years have forced the university to cut it down to five sections today. Still, it remains a perennial favorite. Since most ballroom or partner-style dances require some knowledge and practice, they have dipped in popularity among the general public in recent decades, though interest could be on the rise again because of television shows such as Dancing with the Stars.

In competitive ballroom, dancers are judged by their connection, frame, posture, speed, timing, alignment, and proper use of feet. They wear traditional gowns and tuxedos — or if they’re performing Latin-style ballroom dances such as the samba, rumba, or paso doble, women dress in short skirts and men in tight-fitting shirts and pants to emphasize their leg action and body movement.

But in Lathrop Hall, dancers are decked out in shorts and T-shirts. If their jeans are dragging on the floor, Tomlinson gently admonishes them to cuff their pant legs. This is a movement class, after all.

Tomlinson feeds off his busy teaching schedule with the discipline and stamina of a professional performer. His biggest challenge with the beginners in his course is inadequate time to practice outside of class. During the semester, the students are required to attend four dances sponsored by organizations such as the UW Ballroom Dance Association, which offers weekly soirees at Union South or Memorial Union.

When students arrive for the one-credit course, they take off their shoes in the hallway and sit along the mirrored walls surrounding the studio. Before class begins, one dancer helps another catch up on steps missed during the previous session. The room gradually fills with about forty students, women slightly outnumbering men. This has been the case
in nearly every class during Tomlinson’s tenure, he says.

After a brief warm-up of head rolls and arm circles to a Beach Boys or Cher CD, the beginning dancers pair up to work on the waltz. Throughout the class, students dance to recorded music, though occasionally Tomlinson accompanies them on the piano.

The slow or hesitation waltz is the first dance the class is learning. In week three, they have nearly mastered the whole sequence: the basic steps and then in the conversation position, forward six steps, walk around nine, recover for three, and then balancé, balancé turning, and cuddle wheel.

As they move around the room in pairs, Tomlinson chimes in with lighthearted directives: “Don’t pull or push your partner. Step lightly. Make your first and second steps longer. Keep your focus out. Be careful of your upper arm. Relax your ankles.”

Concentration gives way to giggles and spontaneous laughter. “Don’t forget to breathe,” Tomlinson adds, “and smile — you’re not in pain.” After ten minutes, he instructs the dancers to switch partners and as they’re doing so, to “look at each other — and look interested!”

Trading partners is difficult for Michael Chay x’08, a math education major, who’s taking ballroom dancing as an elective. “A lot hinges on my ability to communicate with my partner through subtle cues and body language, and that can be difficult with someone
I don’t know,” he says.

Chay registered for the course before, but had to drop it when it didn’t work out with his schedule. “I’ve always wanted to fit this in,” he says. “I’ve always been amazed by ballroom dancing.”

In his last semester at UW-Madison, Peter Hudack x’08, an atmospheric and oceanic sciences major and member of the naval ROTC, says he hopes to gain some “basic knowledge that will help me at the balls held by ROTC.”

Melissa Geiwitz x’08 is also hoping to use her new dance skills at weddings — and indeed, more than one romance has blossomed in Lathrop Hall, says Tomlinson.

A consumer affairs and business major, Geiwitz has danced before: jazz, ballet, and hip-hop. “But this is totally different, dancing with someone else,” she says. “I would recommend this class to someone and if I were here longer, I’d take the second level. The professor is knowledgeable, and the class is really fun.”

Teaching these students is easy because they want to be here, Tomlinson says, adding, “I tell them to be serious, but not take themselves too seriously.”

He enjoys teaching beginners and seeing them progress. “In the first class, they learn to walk. Then, they walk to music,” Tomlinson explains. “For many students, this is a release from stress and the only movement they have all day.”

— Karen Roach ’82

History 418: Imperial Russia, 1801–1914
During its summer 2008 military intervention in Georgia, Russia provoked cries of imperialism from newspapers across Europe and North America. But fears that Russia is driving for dominance in the Caucasus and northern Asia is nothing new to David McDonald’s students. They’ve seen the world’s reaction to Russian expansion over the last two hundred years.

Actually, the UW’s class on imperial Russia isn’t quite as old as the tsars. Created in the 1950s by legendary history professor Michael Petrovich, the course once gave generations of Madison undergrads a glimpse of how Russia became the world’s largest state. The class begins with the 1801 accession of Alexander I, the tsar who defeated Napoleon, and proceeds to the First World War, when Russia collapsed into revolution, giving rise to the Soviet Union. But as different as these regimes are, McDonald, the Alice Mortenson/Michael Petrovich professor of history, stresses that there’s a great deal of continuity.

“We really look at Russia as an empire rather than a nation-state,” he says. “We take into account that Russia’s elite were drawn from all sorts of groups. German-speaking nobles, Polish princes, Cossack hetmans, Tatar mirzas — they were all part of the class that governed Russia.”

McDonald has taught the class since the 1980s, and says it’s undergone a variety of alterations over the years, changing to match an evolving understanding of Russia’s history.

“The central problem we’re trying to work through is how Russia looks at the world and society,” says McDonald. “However different their view is from ours, it’s still plausible in their eyes.”

— John Allen