Just call ’em nimble-toed!
Budding Alvin Aileys wowed the crowd with their fancy footwork — and took it on a global journey without leaving the auditorium — during a multicultural dance recital at David A. Boody Intermediate School for Magnet Studies May 11.
Visitors to the Gravesend school on Avenue S, between West Fifth and West Fourth Streets, sat spellbound as youngsters enrolled in the dance program presented the rollicking extravaganza, “All Around the World,” blending hip-hop and other modern styles with traditional folklore dances hailing from many of the nations represented by Boody’s diverse student community.
Among the eye-pleasing routines was one led by seventh-grader Christina Semenyaka, who was born in the Ukraine. Her dance revolved around a tradition she learned from her grandmother in which a girl places a wreath in a river, and the man who retrieves the wreath ends up being her husband.
“Her mother saw the dance and asked me where the girls had learned it, and I said, ‘From your mother!’ She was in shock!” laughed choreographer Jan Ford Chisholm, a graduate of Rutgers who was in the European cast of “Hair.”
The dozen dances paid tribute to, among other nations, Albania, the Caribbean, China, India and Morocco.
