The popular reality series “Dancing With the Stars” doesn’t tell the whole story about ballroom dancing, nor about the costumes the dancers wear. For a more complete look at competitive dancing and ball gowns, Prattans can visit the Delmar Riney Gallery at Pratt Community College, where Ande Hall’s exhibit will remain through this coming week.
Hall was a professional dance instructor for 10 years in Santa Fe, N.M., and also designed gowns for three years, all while maintaining a veterinary medicine practice. After a full day at the clinic, she would rush home, change clothes, put on makeup and teach for the next several hours.
She began her veterinary practice in equine medicine, but found it incompatible with dancing — when horses step on you, they really hurt your feet, she said. She switched to small animals and ended up with the exotics — in the world of veterinary medicine, anything not a dog or cat is considered exotic. None of the other vets in the practice wanted to work on mini pigs, or ferrets or guinea pigs, so they came her way.
Once she got into instructing, she wanted actual ball gowns for her students to wear at public performances, so designing seemed the next logical step, then the construction of the sparkling creations. Still working around her clinic schedule, she brought the dresses to work, where she glued on rhinestones between animal surgeries.
In an Internet search, she found a designer in China who would do the sewing “really cheap” while still providing quality craftsmanship. Sending her drawings off to someone else to do the “not-fun stuff” was a good solution.
Serious ballroom competitors will pay $2,000 to $4,000 for a dress. Hall was able to sell her original designs, made in China, for $500 and still make enough money to make it worthwhile, she said.
A good costume amplifies the dancer’s moves, and the style of dancing influences the style of the dress. Male dancers hate the “floats” of chiffon that swing through the air; they’re afraid of getting tangled up in them, Hall said. Latin dancing is done in a short costume — very short on “ Dancing With the Stars,” she noted.
A man’s jacket is constructed to show a smooth shoulder line when his arm is extended and would look odd if worn when not dancing.
A dance performance typically lasts two minutes, but can require months of preparation. Hall’s exhibit outlines the steps of producing a dance performance based on the movie “Memoirs of a Geisha,” in which she designed the costumes, selected the music and taught seven dancers. The dance was performed one time.If she had stayed in Santa Fe, she would probably have done it again, but by then, she had already made plans to move to Pratt.
Hall came to Pratt in July of 2008 and now teaches ballroom dancing at Pratt Community College.
