Tanya loves ballet dancing, repeating the moves she sees her older sister using when practicing for class or a recital, and soon Tanya is big enough to go to ballet class herself.

When Tanya, the smallest and wiggliest girl in her ballet class, makes friends with a talented newcomer, they both learn something.

Tanya loves to dance but has trouble integrating her steps with the clapping and counting of her ballet teacher, until she tries moving to the music and the sounds inside her head.

When she has trouble mastering her dance steps in the part of the Ugly Duckling for the spring ballet recital, Tanya is discouraged and fears that she has much in common with the character.

Butoh America unearths the people and networks that popularized Butoh dance in the Americas through a focused look at key artists, producers, and festivals in the United States and Mexico. This is the first book to gather these histories into one narrative and look at the development of American Butoh. From its inception in San Francisco in 1976, American Butoh aligned with avant-garde performance art in alternative venues such as galleries and experimental theaters. La MaMa in New York and the Festival Internacional Cervantino in Guanajuato both served to legitimize the form as esteemed experimental performance. A crystallizing moment in each of the three locations—San Francisco, New York, and Mexico City—has been a grand-scale festival featuring prominent Japanese and numerous other international artists, as well as fostering local communities. This book stitches together the flow of people and ideas, highlights the connections in the Butoh diaspora, and incorporates interviewee perspectives regarding future directions for the genre in the Americas.

When an alligator shows up to class one day, Mrs. Iraina and her ballet students are very suprised. But she is able to follow along, so they decide it's okay for her to join. The class starts calling her Tanya and even creates a new dance to showcase her larger-than-life talents and big, swishy tail: "The Legend of the Swamp Queen." Tanya has the starring role.

Tanya wants to dance in toe shoes the way her sister does.