photograph courtesy douglas browne
Douglas Browne says of his partner/teacher Sarah Bohannon, “It makes such a difference when you find somebody where you’re on the same wavelength.”
In his day job as president of Peabody Hotels & Resorts, Douglas Browne strives for perfection. He wants you to have the best possible experience in his luxury hotel. Those who know him from his work with The Peabody, or his stint as chairman of the Greater Memphis Chamber, might not be aware that he also works to choreograph maximum achievement … on the dance floor.
His need to give it a whirl started early.
“My love for dancing started as a child. I grew up in the Caribbean — mostly Puerto Rico — and you couldn’t live in Puerto Rico without being around rhythm dancing. I always loved dancing — and if you could dance, women were more interested in you. So I love dancing and I’ve been pretty good at it.”
A few years ago, he was dating someone who liked dancing and the two agreed to learn the Argentine tango. Their interest in the tango and each other waned, so they broke up. Yet Browne still had the itch to get moving on the dance floor and decided to join the Fred Astaire Dance Studio in Hendersonville, Tennessee, part of an international chain of almost 300 studios around the globe. When his teacher retired about four years ago, he thought that was his finale, too. Sarah Bohannon, however, had other ideas.
She was another instructor at Fred Astaire who had seen him on the floor and encouraged him to get back into it. “She’s a professional and she’s incredible,” Browne says.
“I’m one of these people that tries anything,” he confesses. “I started taking piano lessons about eight years ago. I’ve studied martial arts. I decided to get my master’s degree in business from the University of Memphis. I was an equestrian rider and played sports in high school and college. And I fly.”
photograph courtesy douglas browne
It’s more than just dabbling: Browne is driven to excel. “I’m really competitive,” he says. “When Sarah and I started, we went to Florida and ended up winning a competition there. Then we won a competition in Chattanooga. We won in Texas. We dance well.”
So what is ballroom dancing, exactly? It is, Browne says, smooth. “It’s like Viennese waltz and foxtrot,” he says. “And tango. On the rhythm side, we do rumba, mambo, cha-cha, bolero, all of the rhythm dances. And then we do what are considered show dances or cabaret — the ones that everybody goes, ‘Oh wow!’ and that’s where you see a lot of lifts.”
The learning curve gave Browne an appreciation for how difficult it could be. “Two years ago, doing what I thought was hard, was really simple stuff. I quickly realized that after a couple of months, what seemed hard, really was a lot easier than I thought.”
“It’s a pro routine and seemed impossible, but soon I was doing it where I actually threw Sarah up over my head, she lands on my shoulder, and I’m spinning around with her.” — Douglas Browne
Browne, however, had no interest in mastering what was easy. Last year, he says, “I told Sarah that I wanted to do a really, really difficult routine, and I don’t care if we ever use it anywhere.” He found a choreographer and told him to create a routine that was going to be a challenge and to use Frank Sinatra’s “My Way” for the music.
“He showed me this incredible routine,” Browne says, “and I thought to myself, there’s just no way I can do this.” Those immediate doubts, however, ran into encouragement from his choreographer, his dance partner, and particularly his own sense of determination to pursue his goal.
“It’s a pro routine and seemed impossible, but soon I was doing it where I actually threw Sarah up over my head, she lands on my shoulder, and I’m spinning around with her.”
photograph courtesy douglas browne
Persisting in his practice and achievement was not just about nailing the routine. Browne says, with some satisfaction, that he’s going to be 70 this year and, “I’m healthier today than I was 30 years ago. I’m physically in better shape than I was 30 years ago. Mentally, I’m much more alert and physically better, and I have fun doing it, and I really think more people should.”
To perfect the moves, Browne watched videos of his practice, going frame by frame. “It’s in the details,” he says, describing a hand movement that most people wouldn’t notice but one whose timing he realized was just slightly off. So, he fixed it.
“That’s a cool thing to see how we’ve received challenging choreography and wondered how is this going to happen? But with that ambition he has, he’s not only working on it when he is in the studio, he goes to the gym and makes sure he does his exercises so he can lift me and has the stamina and everything.” — Sarah Bohannon
He is quick to give credit to his instructor and dance partner. “Sarah is really great at the showmanship,” he says, pointing to a photo of them in a competition, “and you can see that she’s the one that adds the pizazz to it all.”
Browne acknowledges that, “for me, it’s a hobby. For her, it’s her job, and she’s great at it. For both of us, it’s a passion. And I think she puts up with me and tolerates me, but she knows that I’ll try anything. She knows I’m daring.”
It’s not just that she’s a good teacher, but their success also relies on their connection. “When you go to these competitions, the judges really look at the connection between the partners,” Browne says. “We figured that out the first time we danced together — we gelled. It makes such a difference when you find somebody where you’re on the same wavelength.”
photograph courtesy douglas browne
Bohannon has always been absorbed by dance. She quickly understood that there was something about movement and she wanted to master it, so she trained in ballet. Wanting more, she started working at the Fred Astaire Dance Studio in Hendersonville about four years ago.
“Getting to do what I love is amazing,” she says, “and what drives me to keep doing it is we use dancing as a vessel to bring more joy and happiness to people’s lives. It’s good for you physically, but it’s an art also, so you get to express yourself emotionally as well.”
When she encouraged Browne to get back into dancing, she did her own homework. “He was a little hesitant at first,” she says, “and he said, ‘As long as you learn my routines, I’ll give it a try.’ So I was practicing his routines and making sure I had them down and he was really impressed that I knew all of his routines.”
Which is not to say that he was an easy student.
“When he started, he was quite stubborn,” Bohannon says. “He was very specific with what dance styles he wanted to learn and those dance styles are not the styles that we start out teaching people. They’re very high-level, difficult dances, but that’s what he wanted to start with. Slowly but surely, I talked him into going back, learning more dances, learning more in-depth about the dances, more technique, more performance, quality expression, and really learning the fundamentals that he needed.”
She also knew how to take advantage of his love for dance. He was learning the techniques for mambo, but he already had ingrained knowledge from learning it when he was growing up in Puerto Rico, and it had become a bit confusing.
“I told him one day that we were going to try something. I said, ‘Forget about the technique that I’ve shown you in this dance. I want you to dance it the way you danced it growing up. Get back into your roots with it.’ And that definitely helped and that was a cool thing for me to see.”
Bohannon remembers when he was determined to do that difficult routine to “My Way” and that they both found the prospect daunting. “Now, just through practicing and spending a lot of time working on it, it feels much easier,” she says. “That’s a cool thing to see how we’ve received challenging choreography and wondered how is this going to happen? But with that ambition he has, he’s not only working on it when he is in the studio, he goes to the gym and makes sure he does his exercises so he can lift me and has the stamina and everything. He puts in a lot of work and effort to achieve those things, and makes me very proud.”
Browne keeps a busy performance schedule. He and Bohannon have competitions lined up around the country when his schedule allows. And they stay busy locally, having danced in December at the Liberty Bowl’s President’s Gala and in February at the Atrium in Overton Square. Along with those recent performances, Browne says they’ve gotten requests from Habitat for Humanity, the YMCA, and New Ballet Ensemble & School to dance at their events.
And when the occasion calls for it, he can improvise with the best of them.
“Once I was judging at a Memphis in May event with Al Kapone,” he says. “After the judging, we’re walking off stage and they start playing ‘Whoop That Trick,’ Al’s song, and he grabs me. He knows that I dance and he pulls me back onto the stage and it’s just the two of us. And he says, follow me. I start doing exactly what he’s doing and the crowd’s just screaming, going nuts. I lean over while we’re dancing and say to him, ‘You realize that you have just improved my street cred in Memphis?’ And he about fell down laughing.”
