Every 20 years or so dance appears on television in a big way. In the 1980s we had Solid Gold, Dance Fever, and Soul Train. In the 1960s there were Shindig and Hullabaloo. When I was a kid my mother let me watch some of these shows after she brought me home from ballet. The Solid Gold dancers in their trademark gold lame leotards were cultural icons even a serious baby ballerina like me could adore. Besides, they were the only dancers on TV.
This year may mark the peak of the latest television dance craze. There are four major dance shows on networks and major cable this year, two new and two returning. Like dance shows past, they’re all contests. And whereas dance shows past did little more than animate the week’s Top 10, today’s shows aspire to serious dance. But the rules have changed.
Take Dancing with the Stars. Open a tabloid and you’ll see that Americans love to catch celebrities in awkward moments. Learning a new ballroom dance weekly is an impossible task for a nondancer and a surefire way to make actors and models and talk show hosts look like idiots. The contestants’ partners pick up the slack and come out looking like heroes in all the spandex and beading. But it is nice to see the “stars” enjoying the process and learning to respect the dance. You can tell they try to get the moves right. Like all reality TV, Dancing with the Stars is a postmodern experience. We’re watching beautiful people try to be beautiful.
The show is a test of its contestants’ work ethic, and as Martha Graham once said, “Movement never lies.”
Welcome to dance reality TV. With names like So You Think You Can Dance and Step It Up and Dance, the shows aim to instruct audiences in what professional dancing is and what it takes to get the rare dance job. Of course, along the way there will be lots of good trash television: Dancers, young, attractive, self-involved, and long-suffering performers usually hopped up on cigarettes and coffee, will do physically whatever producers ask of them. The job market is extremely competitive and (cue the vindictive celebrity judge) brutally honest. Plenty of opportunity for conflict and wounded egos. But with all this inherent drama, what about the dancing?
The best show is Randy Jackson Presents America’s Best Dance Crew on MTV. Jackson’s first independent production, it is smart, entertaining, and the dancing is phenomenal. The contestants are dance “crews,” hip-hop for dance teams. By limiting itself to hip-hop the show teaches viewers to recognize hip-hop dance vocabulary and choreographic styles. (Viewers picked Jabbawockeez, a technically impressive crew with a distinct aesthetic, as this season’s winner.)
One of the nice things about ABDC is that it is the first to feature dancers as creative artists. In addition to the choreography, the crews are responsible for their costumes and, in some cases, the musical arrangement. The challenges this season included creating dances that narrate the history of street dancing, remixing a Michael Jackson music video, animating a popular club dance, and adapting a Broadway musical style. The crews’ responses were, at times, extremely sophisticated.
Showing creative people at work has proven successful for Bravo with shows like Top Chef and Project Runway, but Bravo’s new dance show, Step It Up and Dance, is a disappointment. It follows 12 dancers of various abilities through the audition from hell. The weekly challenges are taken from commercial gigs (think Las Vegas) and tend to favor the contestants with Broadway experience. Performed to an empty house, you get the feeling the dancing doesn’t really matter. The gay men are frequently on the chopping block, being told their dancing should be more masculine. One hip hop dancer finds herself winning and losing the challenges on alternate weeks: In week two the judges tell her that she’s sloppy, but from what viewers see she doesn’t look any worse than the other dancers. Contestants and viewers are left confused. When the dancers become frustrated, the judges’ perky reply is, “You gotta step it up”–as if attitude trumps ability at an audition.
Step It Up and Dance is really about psychological terrorism. Consider the case of Tovah, a classical ballet dancer. In the first episode she tells the judges she is uncomfortable performing hip hop because she has never studied it. One judge’s response: “But, you’re black.” Later they tell her that although she is not a great dancer she is very pretty. (Perhaps she should try a modeling competition?) In her last challenge Tovah and the other contestants learn a sequence from the Broadway show Stomp. The judges cast her off because they just aren’t convinced of her passion, as one judge puts it, her need to “dance or die.” Hmm. Maybe that’s because she wasn’t dancing but walking around the stage banging a broom.
Comparing dancers across disciplines is a tough business, especially when they’re young and inexperienced. Fox’s So You Think You Can Dance, another apples-and-oranges contest in its fourth season, is a train wreck from beginning to end. Producer Nigel Lythgoe seems to have created it so he could enjoy something like Simon Cowell’s reputation as a straight-talking British critic. But he has no knowledge of dance, and the other judges are hardly better. Sometimes sullen, sometimes shrill, they never make much sense. The dancers are mostly young students from competition dance studios, with the occasional breakdancer or junior ballroom champ thrown in for good measure. The dancing is amateurish–of the hold-your-leg-over-your-head-and-smile-real-big -variety–and there’s no room for subtlety. It’s a cheerleading show with everyone rooting for himself.
But last year something strange happened. Danny Tidwell, former corps de ballet dancer with the American Ballet Theatre, showed up at one of the SYTYCD auditions and, no surprise, was put through to the final rounds in Hollywood. Tidwell’s appearance caused a minor commotion within the ballet world: Was the show becoming a viable job opportunity for professional dancers? Would Tidwell go on to a major commercial gig? There was the indignity of watching him perform Mia Michaels’s wretched choreography, but he handled himself well. Maybe he proved the model was working. Too bad he lost in the final.
Natalie Bostick is a writer in New York.
