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Most professional dancers performing today came of age during the era of the megastudio, those enormous dance training facilities—such as Edge Performing Arts Center in Los Angeles and Broadway Dance Center in New York—that feature a vast variety of instructors teaching many different kinds of classes under one roof. The convenience afforded by these studios is fabulous, and their wide array of offerings is certainly enticing and seemingly necessary for any dancer wanting to succeed in today's versatility-oriented commercial dance industry.However, before real estate costs and other economic factors forced many dance teachers to close their independently operated studios, professional dancers often received virtually all of their training at only one or two studios and with only one or two instructors. While the megastudios have certainly made it easy for dancers to access a greater diversity of classes and instructors, they also provide the temptation to jump around from teacher to teacher,...

One of the professors in my masters studies likes to use the following scene in his classes. It's from "The Graduate," and while the movie maybe hasn't aged as well as others, this is a pretty seamless example of brilliant cinematography, editing, and direction.

Maybe what really should be appreciated there is just how perfect the music by Simon & Garfunkle, is. Using pop music that reflected the existential malaise of Ben Braddock, a young man with absolutely no ambition or direction, rather than just traditional Elmer Bernstein-style scoring, was considered, in 1967, pretty damn daring. Songs in film were usually limited to musicials, though by this point the musicial was slowly dying, a reflection in the change of the national attitude; somehow with Vietnam going on, and protests in the street, pretty people bursting into happy songs didn't quite feel right.

In four decades subsequent, pop music has become ubiqutious in modern movies,...