- Mary Murphy is back, and there's actually a story about her absence from the judging table. At first it was fatigue -- she was tired from back-to-back seasons, and then negotiations for last season started to drag, and then she over-committed herself, and then she agreed to be a choreographer instead of a judge, and then she got throat cancer and went on radiation treatment. I'm happy to say that she's currently in remission. I do not care to hear her scream or spout nonsensical catch phrases, but one learns more from Mary Murphy in those instances when she buckles down to give a critique than from any of the other judges. I guess I can't say I'm thrilled that she's a weekly judge, but I'm certainly thrilled that she's cancer-free.
- There are two go-to moves for the contemporary dancers that I don't think we've talked about yet. The first is The Barber Pole. Dancer makes a corkscrew motion with his/her body around an imaginary center, imitating the red stripe on a barber pole. The second is the one where the dancer gets all pixellated and you can't tell what's going on. Or maybe that's just my DirecTV having trouble with Fox.
- Was the first 45 seconds of I, Dummy's turf the best thing you ever saw? We've seen gliding, but the way that his gliding accelerated ... dang.
- Also love that the turf dancers got filmed doing their thing on Grand in West Oakland. My bike commute!
- SYTYCD did, by the way, set the world record for saying "beautiful San Francisco!" and then immediately cutting to shots of Oakland. It was kind of insulting that they pretended the Paramount Theater is in San Francisco.
- So Atlanta was a neverending stream of great dancers. Why not show us more than 0.3 seconds of them dancing? This show really doesn't grossly overdo it with the bad auditions (like Idol does), so even if they couldn't cut the 15 or so minutes (out of two hours) they spent on those, couldn't they trade some of the montage, b-roll, and up-next for a couple more 90-second auditions?
Friday, May 27, 2011
MY SIGNATURE MOVE IS CALLED THE INSECT: A few quick, non-incisive notes about the return of So You Think You Can Dance:
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So happy the show is back, and LOVED the turfing. I predict in the finale thet might bring back some turfers to show off their skills.
ReplyDeleteWhile I appreciate the fact that they don't show a lot of the really bad auditions, and think that it's good they show some so that the audience does see comparisons, I prefer when they just do a montage of bad dancers than when they show the full audition of someone. Regardless of how the judges act, compassionately or harshly, it just seems like sustained mockery. The auditions of the former stripper and the dancer who was clearly mentally ill to some extent, given his multiple breakdowns, felt unecessary to me.
All that said, I love this show -- and particulary loved the dancing pair where it was sort of half ballroom half contemporrary, with the woman in red and her non-auditioning partner.
Ah... the return of Spaceman on Dance. How is it I forget how much I enjoy your perspectives?
ReplyDeleteAnother thing I wish for is: if they're going to show us the choreography call-backs at all, why not take just a minute more to show those teaching (last night, Katee and Jakob/Will) actually demonstrating the combination so it's clearer what the contestants are trying to emulate.
I agree. The turfing was great!
Yeah, that was a really weird audition. It was like ballroom with no steps, just lifts. And the dude was dressed exactly like Arnold 1980 Conan. I was afraid that the big finale would be him cutting off her head and tossing it down the ziggurat. But it was sometimes beautiful and sometimes extremely athletic (but kind of graceless). Definitely impossible not to watch.
ReplyDeleteTwo other auditions that I liked were the 10 seconds of the African American girl with the forgettable name (it was like Jane Smith or Ashley Jones or something like that) who had that leg control that Kayla had a couple of years ago that always impresses me. The kind of legs that are operated by motors entirely separate from the rest of the body, so that you can be flying through the air in one direction and the leg is kind of trailing at an entirely different speed, or your whole core is twisting but your leg is just pointing at the ceinling, like, huh, look at that ceiling, I could stare at it for hours. And the other one was the girl who came back from almost making the show last year (the one with the Wild West hooker makeup), who did the audition with the kind of confidence that said "there is no question in my mind that you made a mistake cutting me last year."
What do you call the contemporary move where the dancer is flinging herself around and then stops, gazes at the audience, hands turned up, all tragic and bereft, and walks/staggers toward the audience? I think we saw it three times last night.
ReplyDelete"It was kind of insulting that they pretended the Paramount Theater is in San Francisco." Try living in NJ and hearing about the NY Giants and NY Jets, and Giants stadium, referred to as being in NY your whole life. ;)
ReplyDeleteMy big problem with that dancer was her PermaGrin - nothing about the music, the dancing, or the "story" suggested that she needed to be Miss Colgate Smile during the whole of it.
ReplyDeleteYeah, I really wanted to see the teachers, even for just a few seconds.
ReplyDeleteThat's a variant of Silent Movie Panic: http://throwingthings.blogspot.com/2008/06/what-id-give-for-footage-of-first.html
ReplyDeleteI can't remember which female dancer it was last night that I thought was interesting because all of her spread-your-legs-wide moves were done with her back to the audience. It made them look physically impressive while not as stripper-move as they usually seem.
ReplyDeleteI hate when they waste time showing the "underdog" guy who just wanted to audition. I mean by putting him on TV aren't you just giving him what he wants? I almost missed "Sex." I think he wasted their time, and then they wasted our time. That just bugs me.
ReplyDeleteI also loved the awesome b-boy who seemed to be spring-loaded... he was amazing.
ReplyDeleteIsaac - so glad you posted! I haven't watched the premiere yet, and probably won't watch the auditions in anything resembling real time. Have they said anything about what Mia's role will be on the show this season (if any)?
ReplyDeleteThe first 15 minutes on my DVR were pixellated garbage, so I didn't hear any of the "welcome back, let's tell you what's going to happen" stuff. The Internet tells me that MM said last year that she was resigning from the judging panel because she didn't feel right up there and that she wouldn't be choreographing any more because she didn't want to become too strongly associated with the show. But she said almost exactly the same thing in 2009 and ended up on the panel, so who knows? The show could stand to build a bigger stable of choreographers anyway (cough Doriana Sanchez Nappytab cough). I'm more curious about whether Wade Robson will ever come back and whether it's going to be 20 contestants or 10 with all-stars again.
ReplyDeleteI believe that I read that it will be top 20, but once they're down to 10 there will be at least some dancing with All-Stars.
ReplyDelete