The NBC audience wept while watching 12-year-old Merrick Hanna perform his robotic storytelling dance Tuesday on “America’s Got Talent.”
So did his paternal grandmother, Judith Hanna of Bethesda, Maryland.
“When I was backstage watching Merrick perform before the AGT judges, I was in tears – so well had he executed the routine I had seen him rehearse,” she told Times of San Diego the morning after the AGT season debut.
A renowned dance scholar, Hanna, 80, says she’s been watching Merrick since the start of his hip-hop career.
Also a dance critic, she’s offered her Encinitas grandson comments on “general aesthetic principles, such as changing direction, level, smiling, looking straight ahead at the audience, and suggesting the incorporating moves I have seen, sending videos, and of course, giving much well-deserved praise.”
She even sent Merrick a copy of her most recent book, “Dancing to Learn: The Brain’s Cognition, Emotion, and Movement.”
Hanna said she hopes he could use the material in a science class.
Currently a research professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Maryland, Hanna teaches as a visiting scholar. She recently was in Brussels and London for the Choreomundus International Master in Dance Knowledge, Practice and Heritage program.
Like her grandson, Hanna has been dancing a long time — since age 10.
“A pediatrician said it would make my feet strong,” she said via email. “It didn’t, but I was hooked. I participate in all kinds of dance; favorites are flamenco, Middle East, African and Latin.”
She says she still performs publicly, doing salsa, while also speaking about her dance research.
“Dancing helps the young and mature alike to learn dance and other subjects,” she says. “Dancing creates new brain cells and connections, using same parts of the brain as verbal language.
“We thought we had a fixed number of brain cells that we lost as we age. But we know now the exercise and communication of the dance art allows growth. So I dance because I love it and because it promotes mind and body health. To dance is human.”
Also human — pride in one’s clan.
Besides Merrick’s younger brother, who also dances and climbs, Hanna has twin 8-year-old grandsons in Washington, D.C.
“They are voracious readers and sports enthusiasts,” she says. “They play soccer players and study piano, hip hop, and break dancing.”
Judith Lynne Hanna also had a star turn.
In 2012, she appeared in a segment on “The Colbert Report,” saying exotic dancing was an art while a bikini clad woman did a pole dance in the background.
The segment was about an Albany, New York, strip club owner who argued that he deserved a state tax exemption as other concert-venues get. Hanna backed the owner on naked dancers being artists worthy of the tax break. (The owner eventually lost.)
She says friends and acquaintances offered “praise and delight that they knew a ‘celebrity.’”
Before earning her anthropology doctorate from Columbia University in 1976, Hanna taught at James Monroe High School (1959-61) in Los Angeles.
An expert witness dozens of times, Hanna has won many awards and written hundreds of academic articles as well as nearly a dozen books.
But family is a current focus.
“Six males in the Hanna family,” she says. “Lots of testosterone. Luckily, I have great daughters-in-law. Love them.”
