Absurdist1968

Because it's television, and people behaving sensibly isn't very interesting for a television audience?

Part of the expected versatility at Ailey is because they're a repertory company that engages far more choreographers than just Alvin Ailey, where, for example, the David Parsons company only does David Parsons work (some of which has been taken into the Ailey repertory after Robert Battle, a former Parsons dancer, became Ailey's Artistic Director), the Paul Taylor company does only Paul Taylor work, Jones/Zane only does Bill T. Jones work, and so forth. The thing is, dancers will move from company to company over the courses of their respective careers, and not always in the same styles/disciplines. I mentioned "a national tour of 42nd Street" a bit deliberately, because it's something I've seen a dancer deal with firsthand. I had a cheerleader friend through junior high, high school and college that was an All-American gymnast, and once she moved into theater (and more than a couple of pilot seasons) she turned choreographer as well. After high school, she went back to her straight ballet training, getting a job dancing in one of those historically-themed, touristy-funded musicals. As a theater/dance major, though, she was mostly doing jazz/modern/character dance in musical theater and modern as a choreographer. Once she finished college, she went to NYC and auditions for CATS (the gymnastics training meant that she got a lot farther in the audition than some of the other dancers she traveled with), though she didn't end up getting that job because dancing semi-professionally in The Hinterlands meant that her technique wasn't as sharp as full-time dancers in The City. Through perseverance, she did end up becoming a swing for the Broadway revival of Candide, following that with the first of two European tours of My Fair Lady, where she sustained a back injury. While she was home recuperating, she got a call from a friend who knew that a national tour of 42nd Street was going out and offered her a spot, but my friend didn't have any tap. By God, though, injured back be damned, she started tap classes. As it happened, she ended up going back to the next tour of My Fair Lady (with a different Higgins). After all of Europe, for a time she accepted a role as choreographer for Anti-Gravity, a specialty troupe of gymnasts/acrobats-turned dancers while dancing in off-season pick-up dance companies with dancers from other companies who were filling time while the major companies were on summer hiatus (yes, many companies not called Alvin Ailey go two to four months every year with no work, where Ailey has a one-month home season and ten months touring internationally). A basic skill set is nice, yes, but if a dancer is looking for actual work, he does well to train in whatever style is hiring when he's looking, as you suggest, and a dancer with a broader (translate: less wilfully limited) skillset is more likely to find Actors' Equity/AGMA work (which encompasses collectively-bargained Broadway and company dancing). Further, factors like wanting to broaden one's horizions (Alex Wong?), loss of job (for example, in the all-too-frequent dissolution of a company) or simple boredom can lead dancers (or even choreographers) to move between companies or even genres (see, for example, the now-dissolved Trey McIntyre Project; McIntyre worked primarily in modern/contemporary ballet both dancing and choreographing, but the last piece he created for his company was a Freddie Mercury-themed tap piece, recalling his earliest dance training, that his company of ballet/modern dancers learned and toured for an entire season). The learning curve between genres may be different for different dancers trained in different genres, which is perhaps the most salient point with SYTYCD. Asking a dancer to achieve a particular level of mastery in an unfamiliar style -- tap, most notably -- in, say, three days; yeah, that's problematic, which is not to suggest that given adequate time, someone trained in ballet can't learn tap well enough to get paid for it, because it has happened. Perhaps there's a difference between being professional dancers and reality show dancers, then, but it doesn't seem unreasonable to ask "dancers" in general to be able to work functionally in any style that a job requires. Dancers like Renee Richardson or Elie Chaib, who dance the vast majority of their careers with a single company/choreographer are the exceptions more and more often. Maybe it's a little easier for someone like Megan Williams to move from dancing for Ohad Naharin to dancing for Mark Morris because they're both modern choreographers, but ... wait, I have to take that back. Megan never had to dance on pointe for Ohad Naharin, but she would (alongside several men on pointe) in Mark Morris's The Hard Nut at Christmas. One sticking point I have with Nigel in particular is the introduction of exclusionary narrative. The idea that a hip-hop dancer is of necessity untrained in any other style of dance is something that he loves to play up; that a ballet dancer is completely out of his/her element doing anything else is another specious point he likes to make. The reality, at least from where I see it, is that I never took any kind of jazz dance class where there weren't hip-hop dancers enrolled, I never took a Graham-technique modern class where I wasn't on the front row with six girls who'd been in ballet slippers since they were four and on pointe since they were twelve. BFA degrees in dance require at least a little bit of cross-training, even if not in street/vernacular dance. But the idea that, on a reality show where building narrative is paramount, it's supposed to seem like a big deal that someone not trained in hip-hop could pick it up quickly (though, to be fair, some of the stuff the show tries to pass off as hip-hop dancing is significantly watered down by the street standard) when it isn't necessarily. My level of expectation may be significantly different, though.

For a hot minute, I would like to talk about the real dance world (the one distinct from the artificial reality that is this show). Regarding the notion that being "passable at everything" can detract from being good at one thing, I'll point to a dance company whose imprimatur Nigel has been lusting for since Desmond Richardson and Dwight Rhoden choreographed for the show aeons ago: The Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater. Every dancer in that company must be fluent in all styles but ballroom and tap (and many of the dancers that have gone through the company have tap fluency despite that). They've got to be able to dance Graham and Horton technique modern (contemporary) to dance most of the repertory. They've got to have mastery of Dunham technique Afro-Carribean. They've got to know Luigi technique jazz, as well as hip-hop (there are at least two ballets in the Ailey repertory that specifically call for modern and hip-hop; Dwana Smallwood said of one of them that she basically had to recall all the time she spent street dancing as a kid and throw out all the classical training she'd gotten since for one such piece). All of that on top of ballet technique, because Alvin Ailey did choreograph several ballets en pointe for other companies that were subsequently taken into the Ailey repertory (not to mention pieces like Night Creature that were choreographed directly onto the Ailey company). It's simply realistic for a concert dancer to be versed in all styles and techniques of concert dance as a matter of employability. Desmond Richardson left Ailey, and before he and Dwight Rhoden formed Complexions, Richardson danced with American Ballet Theater and Frankfurt Ballet (among other companies) and danced on Broadway for the likes of Twyla Tharp and Anne Reinking (including some serious tap). Dancers who intend to work as dancers need to be able to do everything (including tap, should they ever get a call for a national tour of 42nd Street). With the influx of eastern European dancers into international Dancesport, we've also been seeing a fair number of retired ballerinas coming into Latin ballroom, and they actually have a leg up (if you'll pardon the phrase) coming into Dancesport from the standpoint of technique. But again, whoever upthread suggested that perhaps there are people who are training to be on this show as opposed to pursuing actual careers in dance, yeah, there's probably something to that. Given the number of alumni of the show who will toil in relative obscurity as dancers in specialty tours, as chorus performers in Equity theater, or as background dancers for pop stars, appearing on a reality competition show is perhaps warped a little bit out of perspective.

Sort of. More a matter of the first week being a non-elimination week; at some point they were going to have to get rid of four to catch up (five weeks is the top ten point in the season, even with separate results shows). This season they chose to go from fourteen to ten instead of going from twenty to sixteen, and, if such things can be said, it's more logical that way. The last four that don't make the tour at this point can't say they haven't had the opportunity to prove themselves, because five weeks is plenty. On another note, it'll be interesting to see if Serge does get cut. If the "Nigel wants another ballroom winner" rumors are true, well, he's down to just Serge and Tanisha, both of whom were near the bottom this past week. If Nigel were to rescue one of them for the win, it would probably be Tanisha, but even with that, I don't know how long she could hold on after that. Considering that Aaron didn't win last year, though, and Aaron has finished the highest of any tapper in the show's history, it could bode well for Zack if the blander dancers keep getting mowed down by fair-to-middling routines. I'm neutral about Valerie in this case. Now that I think about it, I'm kind of ready for this to be over. As many here have pointed out, there are easily six to ten dancers that are being strung along because the network wants fifteen weeks of programming. There will still be Emmy possibilities for the choreographers and Cat, since this season can't be considered for balloting until June of 2015. Unless there's a serious uptick in either demo ratings or total viewers, the show is pretty much ready to be euthanized. I'd say it would be sad, but a lot of other commenters would probably call me out as a liar.

Not really. He was top 10 in his season and went on the tour (cut the same week as Martha, so just inside the top 10). It's not often that they call back anyone who wasn't top ten as an All-Star or choreographer. In other news, I am over Nigel's Bollywood boner. I'm beginning to believe that here, as with Idol, there have been too many seasons. The novelty has been exhausted for some time, and now the show's creatives are trying to keep topping themselves despite the fact that their best work is well behind them. Oh, I'll keep watching. I'm not as invested anymore, and the longer Nigel pushes to "legitimize" the show (Misty Copeland is a big step in that direction) and aggrandize himself within the industry (and how far can that go once the show is inevitably cancelled?), the less relevant the whole thing becomes. He's still butthurt about the whole NYTimes article from three years ago and is determined to be taken seriously as an international dance impresario, which drives his desire to get the SYTYCD dancers into Step Up movies and professional dance companies (with a not-insignificant amount of success, though Danny Tidwell got where he is now essentially on the skills he had prior to the show). He's about as likely to be taken seriously in the dance world as Tyra Banks is in the modeling industry with the ANTM contestants or Project Runway has been in the fashion industry with every winner not named Christian Siriano. I've been quite amused with how over the past couple of seasons Nigel has been stooping to the level of the average Twitter user with the show's fans, and is now unafraid to openly mock the younger audience members that populate the studio during tapings (the whooping during the top 20 tap routine springs to mind), determined to tell the world specifically how to approptiately appreciate the high culture he's magnanimously beaming into their living rooms. As far as tonight, I didn't see much earth-shattering, but most of the performances were pleasant enough. I think there were about three times as many trainwrecks as I've ever seen in a single episode, which was a little disappointing, but it can be spun as "pushing the dancers" to negate the notion that the show is "providing mediocre entertainment," particularly with the "all-tricks, all-the-time" salsa routine, which would have worked well had it been executed by professional-caliber salsa dancers. Let's not even think about the foxtrot that wasn't. Yeah, I'm feeling trollish at the moment, but it will pass. But it's not as though there haven't been good things emerging from the show's eleven seasons; the fact that Travis Wall has a dance company now is justification enough (with the hope that the company can get a stronger foothold than the Trey MacIntyre Project had; the for-profit business venture that Shaping Sound is tied to is a good sign).

In truth, I was thinking more relative to my age rather than to her age relative to the profession, so your point is well made. Certainly someone her age would have been much more competent en pointe. I'm not sure how late she came to ballet that she hasn't been strong in toe shoes for at least nine years.

Oh, honey, I actually watch the audtions in much the same way I watch The Voice: with my back to the TV. Amir is so young. I don't mean this in a bad way, but I was thinking "put her back in, she's not done yet." If she's not perfect yet and she's still that good, imagine what she'll be when DTH PTP is done with her for real.

Just from Googling, it seems that most everybody is doing better than, say, most of the ANTM alumni, in that none of them are known to be hooked on crystal meth or in jail for anything. Working dancers, teachers, etc., which is really no more and no less than I would have expected from them had they never been on the show (but for the fact that I wouldn't have known whose names to Google). As far as I'm concerned, another day that Courtney Galliano isn't dead is a good day for us all.

Oh, I can, but that's not for broadcast... >:-) I think what we have in Landon is a more-inhibited Benji. The Utah in him, not the gay in Benji (though I wouldn't rule that out, either). A couple of things: With the Olympics (at least this past cycle), there's been NBC Sports Channel. I know that's not a lot of help for people who have to work during the day, but with things like figure skating, it was ALL of the competitors with virtually no filler, often with a different broadcast team (both teams were there at the same time, of course), so the commentary had a radically changed tone. And back to the original brief: Sabra Johnson bit them in the ass in season 3, didn't she? Not so much as a frame of her during the whole audition process, and then she turns around and wins the whole thing. It's not as though there weren't cameras there while she was auditioning; I guess that once they finished editing the episodes, they threw all the other footage out, so the producers actually had to BUILD A NARRATIVE FROM SCRATCH. It has been a few seasons, hasn't it? Like eight. I don't think that that's Nigel's hand. I think it's the way the episodes have been edited thus far this season. The Mummers were probably a pre-set stunt. I imagine that they'd have at least one thing to play that was public domain. Or it could have been cut just for time. (Yeah, I know, that doesn't make any kind of sense, because they could have cut most of the episode for time.)

It's too much to ask, I know, but the thing I'd really love: STOP DEVOTING AIR TIME TO PEOPLE THAT AREN'T EVEN ELIGIBLE TO COMPETE. It's not like there isn't enough footage of JUST AUDITIONING DANCERS to fill several two-hour shows. The B-reel backstory of just dancers who won't get out of the callbacks is also plenty sufficient. If you need ratings, quit making me wait for the callbacks, 'cause I'm taking my Nielsen journal with me. But seriously, there are some hella good dancers among the ones we're seeing, and I don't want another Sabra Johnson situation this season.