A series of ballroom dance lessons changes the lives of both student and teacher in Director Arthur Allan Seidelman’s comedic drama, Six Dance Lessons in Six Weeks.
In the film, a retired woman (Gena Rowlands) hires a much younger dance instructor (Cheyenne Jackson) to give her a series of weekly private ballroom dance lessons at her home. Because of their own issues, they have a spectacular failure during their first encounter. But what begins as an antagonistic relationship eventually turns into a close friendship as they move through dances together and start to really know one another.
In a conversation with Director Jeremy Kagan (Golda’s Balcony) following the DGA screening in Los Angeles on December 16, Seidelman spoke about the challenges of transforming Six Dance Lessons in Six Weeks from the stage play he had directed a number of times into a feature film.
In addition to Six Dance Lessons in Six Weeks, Seidelman’s filmography includes the feature films The Awakening of Spring, Puerto Vallarta Squeeze, Walking Across Egypt, and Hercules in New York; the documentary Buff Enough; the movies for television The Venice Beach Hostel, A Christmas Carol: The Musical, By Dawn’s Early Light, and Trapped in Space; and episodes of the television series Amazing Grace, FBI: The Untold Stories, Nightingales, L.A. Law, Magnum, P.I., Knots Landing, Fame and Hill Street Blues. He received an Outstanding Directing in a Drama Series Primetime Emmy Award nomination for his 1984 Hill Street Blues episode “Doris in Wonderland,” won a Daytime Emmy for Outstanding Individual Achievement in Children’s Programming for his 1980 ABC Afterschool Specials episode “Which Mother Is Mine?” and won another Daytime Emmy for Outstanding Individual Direction in Children’s Programming for his 1982 ABC Afterschool Specials episode “She Drinks a Little.”
Seidelman has been a DGA member since 1978.