I watch So You Think You Can Dance for the dancers and a few of
its choreographers, including Travis Wall, Napoleon and Tabitha D’umo
(Nappy Taps), Shane Sparks, Mandy Moore, Sonya Tayeh and Tyce
DiOrio for his contemporary, not Broadway. His Broadway is dead move on
dead move. Week after week, however, dancers push past whatever
grindingly obvious theme the choreographers hand them to create a
genuine moment or two. However bad the choreography, dancers manage to
redeem it. When the right choreographer meets the right dancer, which
happens at least once an episode, the result is thrilling.
Dance
critics tend to dislike the show, for good reason. (Watch Travis Wall’s
fake audition in which he crams every slam-bam cliche for which the show
is know into a 3-minute, cross-dressing routine that manages while extremely corny, to be great. Choreographer dim, dancer killer.)
But the real problem is the judges.
With
her vehement and irrational distaste for first Brandon Bryant and this
season’s Adechike Torbert, Mia Michaels appears to be unable to bear the sight of heavily muscled black men. (Slender black men are, in her book, OK.) Two geysers of crazy aren’t enough evidence of conscious racism, but
unconscious? Hell yes, especially because Michaels comes from the
unedited id school of criticism. Whatever she’s feeling, she says. In
the end, unconscious is more insidious. When sleep walkers commit a
crime, they wake up indignant at the charge.
In the dance context, however, nothing out of Michaels’ mouth comes close to the stupidity of Nigel Lythgoe’s comment last week. Addressing a dancer, he said:
You are not the artist at the end of the day. The choreographer is. You are the artist’s brush if you like….
Following
that reasoning, actors aren’t artists either. Nor are singers, unless
they wrote the song. What about musicians? (Yes to Mendelssohn, no to
Isaak Perlman?) I can’t remember reading or hearing anything as
wrong-headed about an art form. Is he what we have to put up with to
see dance on TV? Can Michaels employ a personal diversity trainer to address the root of her
problem or will she go on and on, making life hell for the type of male
black dancer she fears and/or hates?
I’m thinking Nigel has a medical problem. His comment is so off wall. Could have knocked me over with a feather. You could be being a bit hard on Mia. She could have an aesthetic reaction to those dancers rather than a race thing. I’d need to see her go off on a couple more muscly black dancers before I cry foul.
That dance routine was awesome!
when was the last time you saw “tchaikovsky’s
sleeping beauty” with a muscular gal.?
I was scratching my head over that comment from Nigel, too. What an affront to all the dance artists on that stage. But I think he knew it was a stupid comment, or he wouldn’t have gone on to mix his metaphors with the “artist’s brush” trailer. He should have talked about the role of dancer as interpreter, which does seem to be the point of this show.