SPINNING SUCCESS Dancers twirl it up for the camera
Published 11:44 am Thursday, February 2, 2012
Tiny dancers in Vicksburg are hoping their twists and turns will spin them right into TV’s big time.
Decked out in bright turquoise tutus, tie-dyed leggings, hot pink gloves and Skecher Bella Ballerina tennis shoes, 11 dance students ages 7 to 9 laid it on thick Wednesday night at the Southern Cultural Heritage Center in front of two video cameras, all in hopes that their dance will spin them into a national commercial.
For now, dance teacher Chesley Sadler Lambiotte said, the film will be shown within the Skecher organization. But Lambiotte is hopeful, along with the dancers, that this could be just the beginning for the dancers, to help promote the Skecher tennis shoe, each one with a rotary disc on the sole to make spinning easy.
“I told the girls to think of this video as being similar to a commercial shoot,” said Lambiotte, the artistic director of the Vicksburg Performing Arts Company.
Lambiotte said she and the dancers will know more once Skechers edits the video.
T-KAM video, owned by Gene Moore of Jackson, was contracted by Skechers to shoot the video.
“For us personally,” he said, “this is a big client.”
As the camera crew was busy setting up, the girls had no problem practicing their hip-hop-style dance on the stage at the Southern Cultural Heritage Center and showing off their dance moves with the spinning shoes.
Lambiotte said she was introduced to the shoe in the fall when she was shopping at Frederick’s downtown for her two sons.
She also was looking at girls’ shoes, said the mother of an infant daughter, “now that I have a little girl.”
Frederick’s owner Norma Massey showed Lambiotte the spinning tennis shoes, and that’s where it all began.
Lambiotte said she already had been working on a hip-hop/classical number for her apprentice dance students and the shoe brought it together.
In turn, Massey told the sales representative for Skechers “and from there it spread like wildfire.”
The music for the dance is the classical Pachelbel Canon in D remixed with rap artist DJ Z Style. Lambiotte and the tiny dancers are calling it “Canon in Diva.”
The girls said they dance four hours a week and aren’t allowed to wear their spinning tennis shoes to school.
“The playground has junk on it that would get our shoes dirty and it would clog them up,” said 8-year-old Caton Blackburn, the daughter of Jeb and Melissa Blackburn.
Lambiotte said the girls had performed before at Holly Days, also at the SCHC; the Miss Mississippi trunk show; and at Tremaine, a dance competition in New Orleans.