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This is day 16 in my Dance Inspirations Advent Calendar (II)

geranium.jpgAmazing how some things stick in your mind for ever. I’ll always associate this song with Pussy (Diana Payne Myers), because of a pirouette exercise in Craig Phillips’ open class at the Urdang Studios in Shelton Street 20 years ago (Craig’s now Course Director at the Urdang Academy). I’d been playing for dance classes for about a year, and was on the point of hating it and giving up, when Craig asked me if I’d play for his evening class. He set a pirouette from the corner on a waltz that went on forever, and I pulled out every last waltz that I could think of to avoid boring the class, or myself, including Wunderbar!. Pussy was the dancer up next when it was time for this tune, and the minute she heard it, she was away, her whole body expressing ‘wunderbar!’, and she was probably singing along as well.


Until then, I don’t think I’d seen anyone actually enjoy dancing as much as that (so many vocational classes have an atmosphere of discipline, drudgery and punishment about them), and no-one had responded quite so ecstatically to the music. It suddenly made it all worthwhile.

If you’ve got someone like this in a class, it rubs off on the others, and before long, other people are singing along, dancing and enjoying the music more, too. I left that class a different person, thanks to the appreciation Pussy and the others showed for the music, and decided that this could actually be a great job after all. And as it happens, in all the classes I’ve played for, no-one has ever danced Wunderbar! with quite the same enthusiasm.

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Jonathan Still, ballet pianist