Go-go club dance is not flitting and chaotically moving around like many people believe, it is not an “unscripted” or “unchoreographed” dance improvisation. Many clubbers are under the misconception that go-go club dancers are skilled to spontaneously create at night club performances, and do not have formal choreography background. In reality, professional club shows have as much structure as electronic music and most of the club dancers can boast of their academic dance achievements.
Today we are talking with one of the three beautiful dancers of the club show “D-Queens’ Elvira Grifanova. ‘The D-Queens dancers always listen to the music first to achieve an understanding of the composition. The dancer is like an instrument – a visualization of the music’, starts our conversation Elvira. ‘The mood and the rhythm of music is felt before starting each dance manoeuvre. So, the feeling is always prior to the physical movement. Every dance is a reflection of our extensive experience, years of hard work on choreography’, adds Elvira.
Long time ago, Elvira left a provincial Russian town where she was born for Moscow to pursue a career in theater and dance. From the very beginning of her Moscow adventures she joined the School of Contemporary Dance ‘Duncan’, where she got a profound knowledge of the body and movement, dance techniques and theoretical studies. ‘After being accepted to my first theater job, I was concerned that my choreography skills were not sufficient to create something unique on my own. So I came to one of the professors of Duncan School. After giving her my music choice and a basic vision of a theme, she knew exactly what I was trying to envision. She magically brought it all to life. She has the amazing ability to work with your dance experience, turning your moves into a truly epic show!”
Elvira has been working with D-Queens for almost two years already. ‘I am grateful to them for a new experience in life, for new friends and new places that I have seen, travelling broadens the mind. I respect and I love theater, but dance has always been an integral part of my life. For now my life is focused on dancing, I took a pause with my theater tasks, but at the same time my acting experience helps me in the every day dance routine. Those who graduated from a theater school know that theatrical higher education provides you with a the desire and skills for lifelong learning and a considerable cultural baggage’.
Talking about her dreams, Elvira explains: ‘I want to work hard and to keep doing what I love to do: theater, dance, cinema. I want to invest my soul into this and I would love to receive appreciation from the people for whom I work. I want to earn enough with what I do in order to have sufficient means for my further artistic development! Everything what I dream of is quite real. The most important is that we should never go below the standards of moral discipline, not to do bad things neither to others nor to ourselves. And in response to all the difficulties, injuries, diseases and misfortunes we should just smile’ .
By Marina Kazakova
Marina Kazakova is a transmedia researcher, poetry visualizer and a writer. She graduated from the department of Transmedia of ‘Sint Lukas University Brussels’ with an art-based research thesis on ‘How to Visualize Poetry’. Currently she runs her own artistic production «Seanema».
