Dance

Every dance track on the radio today, every wedding that ends with the anthem "Last Dance," owes a debt to Donna Summer, the Dorchester-born singer and songwriter who died this week at 63. Summer's big, smooth, confident voice, honed through years of singing gospel as a child at Grant AME Church in the South End, helped catapult her to stardom. As a singer and a lyricist, Summer channeled emotion and empathy. To generations of young people in dance clubs, her songs represented power, sensuality, and freedom.

He already has a Super Bowl ring, and now football star Donald Driver can add the "Dancing With the Stars" mirrorball trophy to his awards collection. The Green Bay Packers receiver won the ABC dance show Tuesday after wowing audiences and judges with his kickin' country-themed freestyle routine. He and partner Peta Murgatroyd hoisted the glittery prize above their heads after being named the new "Dancing" champs. Streamers and confetti rained down from the ceiling, filling the ballroom as they celebrated.

By Matt Pepin, Boston.com Staff and Jason Mastrodonato, Globe Correspondent Here's how the Harvard baseball team killed some time on the road during its Florida trip in March. The video, shot and uploaded to YouTube by pitcher Conner Hulse, features players getting down to the Carly Rae Jepsen song "Call Me Maybe," while traveling to play Bethune-Cookman. The players in the video (from left to right starting with the back row): Jack Colton, Jeff Reynolds, Steven Dill, Andrew Ferreira, Marcus Way, Kyle Larrow, Jon Smart, and Joey Novak.

PICK OF THE DAY Gotta dance It's been more than 25 years since "Dance at Bougival" (pictured), "Dance in the Country," and "Dance in the City" were together in Boston. The first is owned by the Museum of Fine Arts, the other two are on loan from the Musée d'Orsay in Paris. The 1883 full-length, approximately 6-foot-tall dancing couples reunite for "Dancing With Renoir," an exhibit of Impressionist paintings by Pierre-Auguste Renoir. Wednesday hours are 10 a.m.-9:45 p.m. (through Sept.

With his carefully tended hair, tight trousers and perfect harmonies, Robin Gibb, along with his brothers Maurice and Barry, defined the disco era. As part of the Bee Gees — short for the Brothers Gibb — they created dance floor classics like "Stayin Alive," ''Jive Talkin'," and "Night Fever" that can still get crowds onto a dance floor. The catchy songs, with their falsetto vocals and relentless beat, are familiar pop culture mainstays. There are more than 6,000 cover versions of the Bee Gees hits, and they are still heard on dance floors and at wedding receptions, birthday...

When Donna Summer played the Bank of America Pavilion in August 2010, she explained to the audience how much she loved those early iPod commercials. They featured silhouettes of people listening to music and dancing with wild abandon. "That's the way music makes me feel inside," she said. That's the way Summer's music made many of her fans feel, too: safe in a bubble of beats and beauty, and moved to dance like no one was watching. The first record I bought with my own money was "On the Radio," Donna Summer's 1979 double greatest hits album.

‘Dance at Bougival" by Pierre-Auguste Renoir is one of the best-loved works of art in Boston. Six feet tall and a couple of feet wide, it shows a man and woman, full-length and casually attired, dancing in an outdoor cafe on the outskirts of Paris. Cigarette butts are scattered on the ground at their feet. The painting, one of Renoir's most famous, hangs in the Museum of Fine Arts, where it sends out palpable vibrations of pleasure, creating its own mini-climate of amorousness.

Who says high school teachers can't bust a move? A prank video created by teachers at Abby Kelley Foster Charter Public School in Worcester shows them dancing behind unsuspecting students in hallways, in the band room, and in front of an art-storage closet. Now, the clip has gone viral after it aired on national television. The video, " Teachers Dancing Behind Students ," was featured Tuesday on NBC's "Today" show. Since then, "Good Morning America" and a slew of local news stations have asked to broadcast the video, which had garnered nearly 55,000 hits on...

Despite its unpretentious title, Deborah Abel's "Calling to You" is an ambitious 75-minute dance piece with sets, lighting, exotic costumes, and live music. Its subtitle is "A Tale of Ancient Wisdom in the Modern World," and its scenario juxtaposes the story of an unhappy contemporary couple with a version of a parable that the Deborah Abel Dance Company found in Stephen Cope's book "Yoga and the Quest for the True Self. " Saturday evening, in the first of two weekend performances at Boston University's Tsai Performance Center, the piece seemed to have fallen victim to the schematic...

NEW YORK (AP) — Disco queen Donna Summer, whose pulsing anthems such as ‘‘Last Dance," ‘'Love to Love You Baby" and ‘‘Bad Girls" became the soundtrack for a glittery age of sex, drugs, dance and flashy clothes, has died. She was 63. Her family released a statement, saying Summer died Thursday morning and that they ‘‘are at peace celebrating her extraordinary life and her continued legacy. " ‘‘Words truly can't express how much we appreciate your prayers and love for our family at this sensitive time," the statement read.

AP Photo/Adam Taylor, ABC After 10 weeks of highly entertaining performances and phenomenal dancing, Donald Driver and Peta Murgatroyd were crowned "Dancing with the Stars" champions, on the two-hour esason finale of "Dancing with the Stars the Results Show" on Tuesday May 22, 2012 on ABC. Football star Donald Driver made it all the way as the season-14 winner of "Dancing With the Stars. " Driver and his professional partner, Peta Murgatroyd, had been standout dancers all season long, but they really impressed the ballroom with their country-fied freestyle.

Katherine Jenkins couldn't have performed any better during the "Dancing With the Stars" finals: She earned a perfect score of 60 for her two dances on the penultimate episode of the ABC show. Fellow finalists William Levy and Donald Driver finished one point behind the Welsh singer Monday. The actor and the Green Bay Packer each collected 59 points from the judges. Judges' scores are combined with viewer votes to determine which contestant will claim the title and the mirrorball trophy on Tuesday's season finale, when each finalist will perform one...

When Donna Summer played the Bank of America Pavilion in August 2010, she explained to the audience how much she loved those early iPod commercials. They featured silhouettes of people listening to music and dancing with wild abandon. "That's the way music makes me feel inside," she said. That's the way Summer's music made many of her fans feel, too: safe in a bubble of beats and beauty, and moved to dance like no one was watching. The first record I bought with my own money was "On the Radio," Donna Summer's 1979 double greatest hits album.

WHO Matt Besser WHAT The 44-year-old actor is a founder of the improv sketch group Upright Citizens Brigade, whose movie "Freak Dance" he co-directed. Tuesday at 8 p.m., he'll be at the Brattle Theatre in Cambridge for a screening of the film, whose cast includes Amy Poehler, Tim Meadows, and Besser himself. A Q&A will follow. Information is at www.brattlefilm.org. Q. Did you study acting in college? A. I did, yeah, but it wasn't any fun for me. It was a little too pretentious.

Choreographer Mark Morris has been gracing Boston with his artistic invention since the mid-'80s, so his company's regular visits offer a welcome opportunity to see what he's been up to recently. The current Celebrity Series presentation of the Mark Morris Dance Group at the Cutler Majestic Theatre brings three recent works to town for the first time. From the first two pieces on the program, one might be tempted to suspect the one-time bad boy of modern dance has gone soft.

Every dance track on the radio today, every wedding that ends with the anthem "Last Dance," owes a debt to Donna Summer, the Dorchester-born singer and songwriter who died this week at 63. Summer's big, smooth, confident voice, honed through years of singing gospel as a child at Grant AME Church in the South End, helped catapult her to stardom. As a singer and a lyricist, Summer channeled emotion and empathy. To generations of young people in dance clubs, her songs represented power, sensuality, and freedom.

As is obvious by now, 3-D cinema doesn't replicate reality in its infinite gradations of depth so much as offer a stylized version of it - a trick we buy into when it works and instinctively resist when it doesn't. It is an abstraction, in other words, and in the right hands the technology can be to visual perception what dance can be to movement: a focusing, a heightening, a paring away of everything that doesn't matter from everything that does. In "Pina," the right hands belong to the German director Wim Wenders as he frames the work of the late modern dance choreographer Pina Bausch.

Over 1,000 high school and college kids made the scene at Make Noise to Save a Life, a fund-raiser for the Boston-based suicide prevention organization Samaritans. The event at the House of Blues raised $50,000 and featured Joe Bermudez spinning tracks while a slew of VIPs - Sox CEO Larry Lucchino's wife, Stacey, Debbie DiMasi, better half of former House Speaker Sal DiMasi, former federal judge Nancy Gertner, Samaritans executive director Roberta Hurtig, and WEEI yakker Lou Merloni - hung out upstairs in the Foundation Room.

For all of the vaunted democratizing power that the inception of hip-hop introduced into the world of DIY music, there's been a similar, no less important paradigm shift in recent years, as the proliferation of easy-to-use production techniques have filtered down into the consumer marketplace. Two turntables and a microphone may seem worlds apart from a MacBook and a copy of FruityLoops, but the software revolution has had an enormous impact on the ability of kids at home to jump straight into the game with nothing more than an omnivorous appetite for records, an ear for a tune, and hours...