So You Think You Can Dance -- performance show 8/15

Busy voting, will be back later.

Jan

 

Judges tonight: Nigel, Mary, Dan

Hoo boy would I wear earplugs if I had to sit next to Mary. "quiet down English muffin?" Somebody dilute that drink!

Opening 'Broadway' group number from Tyce was fun.

Lacey solo -- eh

Sabra & Neil doing hip hop from Shane. Damn, has Shane had bad luck this season or what? I wish I had a huge Media Jukebox because I wanted to dial up Benji and Donyelle's "Too Much Booty (in da pantz)" routine to get the bland taste out of my mouth. And the judges were similarly underwhelmed, with Nigel complaining it wasn't funky enough, Mary saying it was "too up", Dan "too bouncy".

Lacey and Danny doing a Vietnamese Waltz c/by Jean-Marc. Danny's pretty. Lacey's hands are still awful. Judges raved. I yawned. Next, please.

Neil solo. Finally Neil is actually doing a dance rather than a bag o' tricks. But has he peaked too late?

Lacey and Sabra doing the girl+girl thing c/by Wade Robson.

Can't help comparing this to the hummingbird-flower routine and the two foxes number just doesn't do it. Costumes sort of Japanese -- was wardrobe thinking 'anime'? Could work for foxes. And then the music was -- Indian? WTF? This was a train wreck worthy of Peter Sellars.

Did the choreography bring out the strengths of the dancers? Not particularly.

Well, the judges didn't get it, and I didn't either -- and had you taken these two performanes in isolation and asked me which one was in the final performance week, I would have said 'Hok and Jamie, of course'.

Thinking back on previous years, when the girl + girl performances were wicked good, *and* how good the hummingbird-flower routine was -- not to mention *several* other really fine pieces by Wade this year -- I have to say I was really disappointed.

Danny -- solo. OMG. This solo I could watch. And watch. And watch. And watch. And watch. Just the power and control of the moves. This was the performance I'd been wanting all along when Danny soloed. Quick, send this boy to the UK and put him in Dancing on Ice.

Danny & Neil, c/by Mia -- yowza yowza was that fun or what? This is the kind of energy I was hoping for (and have seen in past years) in the girl + girl number. (Actually I think the routine I am thinking of was with Melody from season one was Mia <FX: tabs over to wikipedia> -- yes, Ashlé Dawson and Melody Lacayanga, "Message in a Bottle", choreography by Mia Michaels. The season two girl + girl number was just sort of eh.)

Sabra's solo -- <shrug> She's gorgeous as usual, but I feel as if it doesn't matter what music she is dancing to. I could just turn the sound off and get the same effect.

Lacey & Neil, Lindy Hop c/by Nick & Kirsten. Well, this routine was hard. And it looked hard. They made a good run at it, but the struggle showed. I would have liked to been watching this with the Lindy Hop dancers from the audition rounds - and heard what THEY had to say about it. My feeling is that those kids could have whupped' the stuffing out of poor Lacey and Neil, no matter the praise of the judges.

Sabra & Danny, cha cha c/by Melanie La Patin. Although really wasn't this more like a Latin Medley? Aren't some of those moves usually found in the samba? I pretty much agree with the judges that the beginning was iffy but at the slow part they kicked it up a notch or two. Nice performance quality, even if the technique was not the best. And oh, what a pity we could not have seen more performances with Danny and Sabra over the course of this show. Feh.

So: performances of the night: Neil and Danny in Mia's 'two princes' routine, and Danny's solo.

The 'not worthy of the finale raspberry' goes to Mary Murphy for dumbest comment ("English Muffin" ? WTF? ), Wade Robson (WTF was he thinking) for choreography, and for performance, Sabra and Nieil for Shane's hip-hop. Honorable mention raspberry , 'wake me when it is over' to Jean Marc G. for the Viennese (almost typed 'Vietnamese' there) Waltz. Big raspberry to the new show structure that pairs dancers WAY too long. Imagine what it would have been like to see Sabra and Danny all year long.

I voted for both Sabra and Danny -- when I could get through. Lots of busy signals for Sabra at first, whatever that's worth.

Jan

 

Whether I liked it or not is not relevant. I do not object to the idea, nor to choreographers experimenting. I object because the piece did not work for me, and from the sound of the comments the judging panel made, it didn't work for them either.

Yesterday I was leafing through my copy of Tim Gunn's book A Guide to Quality, Taste and Style and came upon a passage where Tim says he asks his students at Parsons not to say I like it or I don't like it when commenting upon work in class. He asks them to say WHY the piece appeals (or doesn't) and address the technical issues.

In the case of Wade's hummingbird-flower routine I could easily go on at some length about why I think it is a masterpiece, and why the performance was exquisite. I could list specific points of excellence in choreography and execution, all of which could be used to compare/contrast with other dances on the show or other movement-based arts, whether in the same style or a different one.

For the two foxes routine, I cannot. Granted, when I do not 'like' a piece, the dancers have an uphill battle to convince me that the choreography was worthy. But no matter how beautifully Lacey and Sabra might have danced at individual moments in the routine, they did not convince me, nor did they convince the judges.

If the dancers did not convince me, but the judges rave about a piece (e.g. Mia Michael's routine where young Mia dances with her father), I am perfectly willing to say that something more is going on in a piece that I must have missed. Similarly if I can make explicit what I liked, even though the judges didn't like it (e.g. Mia Michael's piece with the the goggles and the rubber gloves), I can make the same argument as you about experiemental works, but I can also say why the piece appeals to me. So if I had Nigel & Co. in my living room, I could say, "look at X, look at Y, look at Z, these elements are very satisfactory to me, and I think the dancers performed especially well here" and make the case for why I thought it was a successful experiment.

But when I don't think a piece came off, and the judges too are struggling to evaluate it, I am forced to conclude that on some level it was not performed well enough. Lacey and Sabra couldn't sell it to me, and they couldn't sell it to the judges either. This is bad.

Whatever the virtue of the two foxes might be as a work to watch in performance, I will say boldly that it fails utterly as a competition piece, in that it did not give the two dancers a showcase for what they, as individual dancers, could do especially well, nor does it have the element of 'surprise' in bringing out qualities the dancers had which we had not seen before (contrast this with the angel/devil piece where Neil made a huge leap forward in performance ability).

I am open to hear more about what you liked, and I'm willing to watch the piece again to see things I missed. But on the first viewing, I have to say, I can't see the 'way in'. And when I compare this piece to earlier in the season, when most of Wade's pieces reached out and grabbed me by the throat and didn't let go, I'm tremendously disappointed.

Jan

 

I wish I had had the time to watch his solo in slo-mo. It is certainly worthy.

I don't have the vocabulary either, so I can't name the move. But I can say that if you are going to do the same move over and over and around and around like that, just as when Scotty Hamilton does off three double Axels in a row, it is not as simple as they make it look. You had better be a brilliant technician, because if you are the least bit off-balance when you land from the one leap it is going to show up like crazy when you have to adjust in between to make the takeoff for the next. And Danny was tossing them off like it was nothing.

This had the sense of effortlessnes, the feeling of "I'm just playin' around here" that conveys the idea I am the master of my domain. Absolutely brilliant.

And the other place, where he changed the speed of his revolution -- !

The power, the control -- and finally, the relation to the music that I didn't see earlier.

Gotta love it.

Jan

 

Sure, I understand that. I have had plenty of moments on the show where I liked certain things in the behind-the-scenes footage, then when I saw the same move on the big stage, it just didn't come off.

In my one brief try at workshopping fiction, I learned it is valuble to give specific notes, both for the parts you thought were especially good AND the parts you thought were broken.

So the thing that does bother me about your commentary is that as I said before, we could watch the hummingbird-flower routine and I could go over it point by point saying why it works for me. I'm not saying that if I like it, you have to like it, too, but theoretically, if I pointed out some stuff you missed, maybe you would be able to appreciate the construction of it on a technical level more, even if you didn't like it any better than you did before.

It bothers me that you say 'I don't have any points to explain why I liked it, I just did. ' because -- selfish me -- I can't learn anything from that which will help me appreciate what Wade was trying to do, even if I don't like it any better. I want to feel that I have given the piece a chance, but when I can't understand what Wade was trying to do, and the judges can't figure it out either, I am left with nothing. Without clear, specific notes, I can't step up my performance as a watcher.

Jan