I have a confession to make: I like "So You Think You Can Dance." I mean, I like it not just as a guilty pleasure or with a hold-my-nose-because-hey-it-promotes-dance attitude. I mean that I look forward to watching it and when I do, it leaves me smiling, cheering and wanting more.
Maybe that doesn’t seem like much of a confession. After all, people across the country love the show. 16 million viewers called in to vote for Season Three’s final four contestants and more than 10 million tune in on average. Over eight million viewers watched the laggard start to Season Four, when the judges began sorting out the good, the bad and the ugly at cattle-call auditions across the country. Along with shows like "Dancing With the Stars" (which I find far inferior and don’t watch), "So You Think You Can Dance" is credited with creating a surge of popular interest in dance. Fans gossip about their favorite dancers on message boards and shell out big bucks to see the past season’s top 20 contestants perform live in sold-out rock concert arenas.
But I’m a dance critic and a dance critic isn’t supposed to like "So You Think You Can Dance." The scant coverage I’ve seen from serious arts writers has been judgmental and sniffy. A New York Times story about former American Ballet Theatre dancer Danny Tidwell (Season Three) spoke of him being a "prince" among "paupers" and unworthy of his rivals. A pillar of the Australian dance scene decried the Aussie version of the show saying that it would ruin the art form in her country.
I’m not entirely unsympathetic to their objections. I, too, roll my eyes at the melodramatic, contortionist flailings of the "lyrical dance" routines. (There’s a reason to call them "routines" rather than "works," which would imply they are real works of art). I lament that dance on the show is an entirely commercial affair. The highest goal for the top winners — the champion receives $100,000 — is to land work "in video, in TV, in movies," as executive producer and lead judge Nigel Lythgoe described to the mesmerizing popper Robert Moraine. I couldn’t help but note that the highlight montage was filled with enough flips for a Romanian gymnast team. I cringed when 21-year-old William Wingfield performed the most artful solo of the L.A. auditions only to be told that, although judge Mia Michaels "honor[ed] and respect[ed] the statement you danced today," she felt that he ultimately lacked the technique to move on in the competition. What would these judges do if confronted with someone trained in release technique, you have to wonder? How would they size up a Cunningham dancer?
I also realize that you’re never going to accept "So You Think You Can Dance" if you can’t stomach a show like "American Idol," its model. It so happens that I like "American Idol." I find its three judges a fascinating study in what constitutes good performance criticism and find Simon Cowell to be a model critic. "So You Think You Can Dance” is getting close to hitting its groove with the "Idol" formula. Last Thursday’s episode served up its share of hopeless wannabes from an earnest Russian divorcee to the pale, bespectacled, hip-thrusting "Sex" — the William Hung of the dance world. It ain’t exactly PBS, but it’s amusing. More importantly, the judges are building rapport and becoming as familiar as Paula, Randy and Simon. Nigel Lythgoe doesn’t relish sneering as much as Simon Cowell does on Idol," but he has the predictable and tiresome habit of lecturing dancers on their "arrogance." Mary Murphy screams her head off and inducts favorites to her "hot tamale train," but she knows ballroom and gives useful feedback. Mia Michaels was already whipping out the hankies, weeping for a visually-impaired hopeful because someone close to me lost her eyesight who was a dancer." Is it ridiculous? Yes…and it’s entertaining TV.
But here’s the deeper reason why I like "So You Think You Can Dance:" the dancers themselves. They are, overwhelmingly, not Juilliard School graduates or Kirov Academy material. They went to small, local dance schools or taught themselves to dance by copying MTV videos in their living rooms, even — in the case of many poppers and b-boys — taught themselves on the streets. Sure, some are pros like Season Three’s Tidwell. They have refined training and are angling for a more lucrative venue, but most of these early hopefuls have full-time jobs, not enough money for classes and practice in cramped bedrooms. They are the actual experience of dance in America, far more than any dancer at the School of American Ballet or Tisch School of the Arts.
In the weeks to come, as the first round of contestants duke it out in Las Vegas and the field winnows, some truly notable talent will emerge if past seasons are any indication. For now, when I watch these dancers and see how badly they want to get on the show, I think of my own experience coming to dance. My mother put me in one of those small, local dance schools when I was four. At 10, I decided I wanted to ride horses. By the time I had a change of heart two years later, we’d moved to a region where there were no good ballet schools and almost no opportunity to see professional dance.
I was elated when I discovered my school’s color guard. Not because it involved spinning flags alongside the marching band, but because, between tricks, I would get to dance. I tried out three years in a row before I made it to the big leagues — a drum and bugle corps called the Blue Devils. Dancing in front of those stadiums of fans was one of the highlights of my life. I still regularly have dreams about rejoining the Blue Devils so when I see those "So You Think You Can Dance" contenders, whether it’s the b-boy who practices between his economics classes or the soccer-playing girl whose face lights up as she flings herself across the stage, I remember the feeling of wanting to dance more than anything.
In Retrospective Exhibitionist, New York postmodernist choreographer Miguel Gutierrez shows a video of himself as a young dancer. He is the lone guy among a clod of amateur dancers in a cheesy dance recital. It’s hilarious because it’s the kind of video you just can’t fabricate. It’s also oddly touching because most of us who love dance have been in one of those cheesy recitals. Then comes the highpoint of Retrospective Exhibitionist, Gutierrez’s live, tour de force solo cycling through ever goofy dance move, every piece of ripped-off ‘80s video choreography, you might have tried alone in your bedroom late at night. Watching it, I could picture Miguel Gutierrez as a young budding dancer, doing just that.
This is how most of us first experience dance in America — not New York City Ballet or the Paul Taylor Dance Company — and this visceral experience of dance, in whatever form we can get it, is how we learn to love the art. Gutierrez moved on to performing with the Joe Goode Performance Group and is now making sophisticated works as an artist in his own right. I moved on to dance as art by taking ballet and modern in college, studying dance history, seeing the New York City Ballet and the Paul Taylor Dance Company perform and, eventually, becoming a critic — a role in which I’m privileged to know dance in its least commercial, most nuanced and emotionally and aesthetically challenging incarnations.
Who knows what the contestants on "So You Think You Can Dance" might move on to and, who knows what the audience, once hooked on the show, might move on to as well? So, protectorates of dance as serious art, let’s not be sniffy about "So You Think You Can Dance." Remember your dance roots, or at least the roots many of us experienced. If a former Blue Devil can become a worshipper of Balanchine and Cunningham and even come to appreciate Yvonne Rainer, then at least a fraction of the "So You Think You Can Dance" audience can discover that backflips and spinning with your foot next to your ear are just the beginning of the expressive wonders that dance has to offer.
As for those hapless hopefuls like the decidedly un-sexy Mr. Sex — keep living the dream. This former Blue Devil salutes your spirit.
Rachel Howard is the dance correspondent of the San Francisco Chronicle. Her website is www.rachelhoward.com.
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