My name is Sharon Davis

I am an Australian dancer, based in London.
I dance Lindy Hop, Charleston, Blues & Burlesque

email / sharonmdavis@me.com
phone / +44 (0)777 444 6100 (UK)

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// Vintage Dance Videos
Bob Fosse!

Bob Fosse!

Anyone who’s taken my jazz classes recently knows I’m on a huge Bob Fosse kick (it all started when I began looking for inspiration for my new Beatnik routines, my current pet project). Nah, not 1970s “Spirit Fingers” Fosse, but the way cooler 1950s Fosse....
Stompology Inspiration

Stompology Inspiration

As promised, I’m posting up all the video clips that I referenced during Stompology 2010. Ballin’ The Jack, choreographed by Gene Kelly for a television special (with Donald O’Connor) in 1960: And here are the numbers that inspired my Beatnik Routine! Firstly...
Hot Mikado

Hot Mikado

Here is colour 16mm footage (no sound) from the 1939 production of The Hot Mikado, at the New York World’s Fair. The musical was an all-black adaptation of Gilbert & Sullivan’s The Mikado, with jazzy tunes, big-name performers and famous dancers, including Bill Bo...
Go Down Death 1944

Go Down Death 1944

Here’s that snippet of a black couple dancing in the 1944 film Go Down Death that I mentioned to some people recently. Juan stumbled across a compilation clip someone had thrown together on YouTube, and the first half of it was all vintage burlesque from Harlem, so he was s...
Harvest Moon Ball

Harvest Moon Ball

This weekend in Munich for the Rock That Swing Festival, Juan and I taught a class of moves from the Harvest Moon Ball. As promised, here is the footage I showed at the beginning of class. It’s a compilation I put together of a bunch of the surviving footage, overlaid with ...
Who Inspires Me: Vera-Ellen

Who Inspires Me: Vera-Ellen

Definitely one of my great idols, she had the most beautiful lines with her graceful ballerina’s legs. If Cyd Charisse was the womanly femme fatale, Vera-Ellen was sweet, innocent, childlike, even a little goofy. She combined classical ballet and pointe work, with the 1940s...
New footage of Frankie Manning

New footage of Frankie Manning

I just got pointed towards a snippet of footage of the late great Frank Manning, social dancing in the Savoy Ballroom in 1937!  I have so much vintage footage in my collection (over 2,000 short clips on my laptop alone), that sometimes it seems impossible that I could ever stumbl...
Jumpin’ Jive: The Girls vs The Nicholas Brothers

Jumpin’ Jive: The Girls vs The Nicholas Brothers

If you ask ‘Who was the greatest flash act of the 1940s?’, a lot of people might suggest The Nicholas Brothers. Ok, fair enough. But I stumbled across a pretty wild clip of some high-kicking, full-splitting and fast-flipping ladies who show that it wasn’t just t...
Get your Nagasaki on!

Get your Nagasaki on!

Well, the lyrics may be wildly politically incorrect these days, but Nagasaki is in my opinion a slammin’ little jazz tune. I’ve got renditions I love by Django Reinhardt, Adrian Rollini, Gene Krupa, Benny Carter, Don Redman, Fletcher Henderson, Putney Dandridge, Will...
Shorty George

Shorty George

I just stumbled across this clip of Rita Hayworth and Fred Astaire dancing ‘The Shorty George’ in the movie You Were Never Lovelier (1942). A nice, if slightly odd, little tribute to one of our legends, George “Shorty” Snowden. George was a first generatio...