Power to the Dancers! is about the relationship between personal growth and dancing. Infinitely more than an exercise book, Power to the Dancers! adds dimensions to fitness by addressing the whole person. Personal in nature, universal in appeal, the book is a chronological series of essays, poems, anecdotes, dreams, and observations on teaching dance, as well as detailed workshops on Improvisational Rock Dancing, Creative Dance, and Dance Yoga-Cize. The mood of this book is inspirational as well as instructive. Author and teacher Beverly Kalinin shows how she discovered dancing to be the guide on her life journey and encourages others to make the same discovery. "The obvious connection between personal growth and dancing commands attention," says Ms. Kalinin, as she urges people to recognize and use dance movement as the powerful tool it is for raising self esteem. The "power" in the title refers to self power, confidence, and self-esteem. We are all dancers, though some of us have suppressed our dancing selves, and when we become in touch with dance movement again, we grow personally; we become self empowered. And we must remember there is no such thing as not being able to dance. People must forget their feet and know that dancing, like good self-esteem, comes from within. Dance steps are unnecessary. If one's dance feels right, it is right. Likewise, if one truly feels confident in the world, one will, indeed, be so. The Workshops in Power to the Dancers! are enablers designed to bring out qualities and abilities that lie dormant in each of us. In my classes I feel like the Wizard of Oz, bestowing upon my students not a heart, a brain, or courage, but good self-esteem. "But you always had it and didn't know it," I tell them as we go through the lessons. This book is for everyone who loves dance and for anyone! who is striving to increase his/her sense of personal worth in the world. In addition to teaching adults and children dance throughout the San Francisco Bay Area for fifteen years, Beverly Kalinin is a freelance writer of newspaper articles, poems, childrens stories, and magazine pieces, contributing to such periodicals as Dance Teacher Now, Salome: A Literary Dance Magazine, and others. She has published a volume of poetry, "Supermom Wonderwife." Also completed is "The Serra Series," children's picture books. "Let the Fire Fall" is the name of her current novel. FOREWORD The idea that dancing could be a vehicle for women for actualizing their powerful selves originally occurred to me when I discovered that dance kept reappearing at crucial times through the history of my personal growth and when I began meeting so many women who desperately wanted to dance. I realized that dancing, this marvelous tool, had served throughout my life as an opening device with which I probed for my hidden self power, drew it forth, nurtured its development and increasing strength through the years, and finally claimed it for an integral part of my true self. How had dancing helped me live more fully, I wondered? Why are other women drawn to dance as to a kindred soul who will nurture and support them in hard times? What does dancing do for us? The answer, reduced to its simplest form, is that dance is movement and movement is life. Whether our dance movement is relaxation, meditation, exercise, or communication, it flows, as does life, bringing us from one point to the next in our journeys. In the flowing process we satisfy our natural urge to respond to all of life's rhythms. When I began teaching dance seven years ago I met women who had yearned to dance all their lives. They did not seek to be professional performers; they wanted simply to move comfortably in social dancing. They needed more than ballroom dancing with its prescribed steps (They would not have enrolled in my classes if this were not so.) They wanted to express themselves through their bodies. They wanted to move easily. They desired to feel free. They craved self-confidence - not only in dancing. I decided I must use dance in my classes as the powerful tool that had accompanied my development. I suspected that the personal histories of the students were colored by sporadic dancing experiences similar to my own. I felt that if other women could trace dance through their lives, as I have done in Part I of Power to the Dancers!, they could recognize its special worth as growth's guide. At the very least each woman would appreciate the design interwoven throughout her life by dance. So, PartI presents chronologically dated entries of lifelong dancing experiences with which, I hope, the reader will identify. The entries consist of essays, poems, historical anecdotes, dreams, observations about dancing and teaching, and even a mini melodrama. Part II is for women who teach others to dance and for women who teach themselves. The Improvisational Rock Dance Workshops, the Creative Dance Classes, and Dance Yoga-Cize comprise Part II, including a complete Mus