I’ve managed to miss all the installments in the Step Up movie franchise (aside from the over the top trailers showcasing the struggles of dancers working out rich/poor, uptown/downtown, ballerina vs the street cliches), and the latest “now-in-3D!” chapter doesn’t quite sound like the place to wade in:
Preposterous plot devices, leaden acting, and clunktastic dialogue are acceptable in a dance movie, but bad choreography is not, and it’s during the dance scenes that Step Up 3D fails. (from the Slate review)
Even though I like dance, I’m not quite sure that the best things happen while you’re dancing when you’re simultaneously trying to advance a plot. (SYTYCD and Dancing With The Stars made me think that adding a panel of judges to the mix was also a bad idea, but clearly I’m in the minority on that one.) All of that is an overly long way of explaining why I, an avid Hulu user, had also been avoiding the internet channel’s special made-for-Internet production THE LXD. I may love new media experiments, but the name alone–The Legion of Extraordinary Dancers (!)–was much too much more than my jaded mind could take.
Still, battling a bout of insomnia the other night, I noticed that the episodes didn’t require much of a time investment and I caved to taking a sample. And then I proceeded to watch them all. It was a fun ride! I started to wonder about all those conversations we have in the wider performing arts field about the work we love and the public we know we need to find new ways to reach. Will THE LXD and slickly packaged productions like it do anything to help advance that audience-building cause? Here’s a sample to help you decide:
Even if it exhibits a great deal of craftsmanship, the music (by Nathan Lanier) is horribly kitsch – a cross of the most hackneyed Hollywood bombast mixed with Enya-styled sentimentality. In short, it is a perfect expression for the mass media, impressive in its skill and debasing in content.
The value of the Internet is that it can reach small, specific communities through which artists can at least try to develop responsible social and artistic relationships. The mass media, by contrast, creates an alienation between the artist and his/her public. The inherently communal purposes of art are lost and the public is simply exploited for financial gain.
This is one of the main reasons the mass media so often engenders poor taste. It removes artists from a sense of responsibility to their communities. If we create tacky, debasing art and have to face the people in our own relatively local community, we would be more responsible, not only because we would face their contempt directly, but also because we would likely care for them and want to elevate instead of degrade them.
The Internet’s move toward the mass media is another sign that its brief golden age is ending.