Wednesday, July 2, 2008

TONIGHT'S TALLY OF OVERT REFERENCES TO SEXUALITY BY NIGEL -- AT LEAST FOUR: Over the course of tonight's exceptionally and perhaps unduly long SYTYCD, it became clear that this season has the haves and the have-nots. The haves -- that is, the have-a-chance-of-making-the-final-fours -- are those who are either obvious favorites or who strike me as having a chance of busting out with something amazing despite a more under-the-radar early set of dances. The eight haves are:
  • Twitch and Kherington: it's always good when you get to perform a dance that will be remembered by an obvious catch phrase -- the hummingbird, the dead dad, the office politics, and so forth. The bed dance was one of those dances. As for their paso doble, I liked it much more than the judges did. Usually a paso doble on this show involves a strong matador and a girl trying hard to look like a cape but actually looking like a girl trying hard to look like a cape. Whether it was true to the intent of the dance or not, I appreciated Kherington's fierceness -- being a matadrix instead of a dishraggy kind of a cape had a nice feminista thing to it. But all this ruminating is kind of irrelevant, because neither Twitch nor Kherington is going anywhere anytime soon.
  • Katee and Joshua: they got the less showy of the two Mia dances this week, and I must confess that during their pre-dance clip, I was feeling a little eyerolly about what feels like a whole lot of Mia dancing thus far this season. But I loved this one much more than the bed dance, which was a lot more gimmicky. This one was just bare-bones Mia unplugged, and it was gorgeous. I found their West Coast swing to be a little lead-footed (except for the parts when Joshua was doing the Flintstones-accelerating-their-car footwork that is so very Benji) compared to the real thing, but these two have really proven themselves week in and week out. Katee is still a bit of a cipher -- she's lucky to have the far more charismatic Joshua as a partner -- but I see a bit of Sabra potential in her.

(we pause here to acknowledge, as Isaac did last week, that based on what we've seen so far, these four are running head and shoulders above everyone else in terms of being deemed America's favorite dancer -- but I'll add one more to my top bracket:)

  • Will: Poor Jessica -- let's just put her out of her misery already. You can see the pain in her eyes every time a judge tells her she's not Will. But seriously: who is? I am dying to see Will paired with someone else, because he is astonishing. Twitch is great, Joshua is great, but neither of them has shown the sheer WOW that Will is capable of. He doesn't have the gorgeous lines of a Danny Tidwell (given that he's like three feet shorter than Danny), but he also doesn't have the cold inaccessibility of a Danny Tidwell, so if he can pull away from Jessica and have a real breakout kind of a week, he's an obvious top 2 guys kind of a dancer.

For whatever reason, I have decided that I should select a top eight, and so here are my other three. They are currently nowhere near the others, but one should recall that once the partners start getting shifted around, some unexpected butterflies often emerge.

  • Chelsie and Mark: I love Mark. I think that in a year with Twitch and Joshua and Will, he is unlikely to win, but I find him interesting and quirky and neat to watch. Chelsie feels incredibly young and kind of pageanty to me, but I could see her maybe coming into her own a little ways down the road. (Especially since she seems to lack that dumb-as-a-board-please-stop-talking-now thing that Jaimie had going on last year.) And given that I didn't care for either of their dances tonight -- what was that jazz thing that everyone loved? And the fifty-pound electric blue feathery thing that Chelsie had to wear for the foxtrot? Note to wardrobe: sometimes fewer feathers make a more lovely bird.
  • Courtney: with the exception of Benji Schwimmer, this is a show about evoking emotion. Jury's out as to whether she can do it. Sometimes I think it's there, sometimes I think it's not.

(Comfort, Thayne, Kourtni, Matt, Gev, Jessica -- I wish you well and will enjoy watching two of you do a random dance or two on tour.)

A couple of other thoughts. I don't think I've ever liked a Cecily and Elisa routine. Their choreography is almost always the weak link on any given episode, and tonight two couples were hurt by it. It just can't always be that the dancers fail to hit their routines, can it? I would also like someone to explain to me what exactly "jazz" is, as distinct from contemporary and broadway. I once thought that jazz was everything that wasn't ballet (and I had some supersnazzy sequined costumes for my jazz dance recitals), but after a few years of watching this show, I just don't know anymore.

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