Shhh ... don't tell anyone but here's what I do on Friday mornings to milk my inner diva.
As the D.C. area season winds to a finish, Wolf Trap brings the Pittsburgh Ballet to town on Tuesday. I spoke with Dwight Rhoden and Etta Cox about "Smoke 'n Roses," a regional premiere, for Weekend here.
And last night, I popped up a batch of popcorn and settled in to watch the season finale of "So You Think You Can Dance. I'm not a fan of the Fox network program, which in the final round garnered 16 million phone in votes, but there must be something instructive in appointment television that features dance as its centerpiece. We've come a great distance from regular seasons of "Dance in America," which I grew up on years back, watching Martha Graham, and City Ballet's echt Balanchine, Twyla Tharp, Paul Taylor and other contemporary classics. (Don't remind me that Mark Morris was on Great Performances last night. As "the only family in America without cable" according to my children, I can't get MPT/22 and my local PBS station, WETA/26, has long since ceased running arts programming, preferring investment and how-to guru shows like Suze Orman and Dr. Dean. (So, if someone out there TIVO'd the Morris and is willing to share, let me know.)
But there must be something the dance community can learn for "SYTYCD's" popularity. Granted I have no patience for the commercials and the idiotic banter among host and judges. I hardly ever watched the program, though I did root for Daniel Tidwell, who trained at the Kirov Academy and worked with ABT II and Complexions before his latest experiment in crossing over to pop stardom. The pieces barely clock in at 2 minutes, so maybe American audiences raised on "Sesame Street" and MTV continue to suffer from attention deficit disorder. And the emphasis on physical tricks, flips, splits, dives and such, is telling too: for sedentary Americans used to participating in sports from their sofas and love seats, this is just another action-packed example of kinesthesia -- arm-chair thrills without breaking a sweat. Here's an Astaire-esque piece with Danny that I enjoyed.
But the top-ten contestants from the Fox program will tour this fall, and we're not talking the Kennedy Center. So, can some of that stadium audience be filtered into concert halls for something a little more substantial? Should more companies, modern and ballet, tap, jazz and fusion, take the Trey McIntyre approach, choreographing to Beck and The Beatles instead of Bach and Glass? McIntyre's company received a rousing reception this past week at Wolf Trap. The ballet dancers, gleaming with sweat, coursed through McIntyre's pretzel-like partnering, diving, leaping, chasing the music in a breathless display of physical dexterity. McIntyre is one of those choreographers who favors too many steps, filling out the pulsating music, whether it's bluegrass-inspired rock or classic Beatles, country, or even Beethoven, he never seems let his dances calm down. "High Lonesome's" fuzzy story of family disfunctionality, "Crying," a farewell duet set to Roy Orbison's catch-in-the-throat vocals and, finally, "A Day in the Life's" parsing of the Beatles canon, show McIntyre as proficient, but not deep. (Jason Hartley's solo to the glorious "Golden Slumbers," while beautifully danced, gets weighed down by over-eager choreography.) While true dance watchers see that as the problem, the television generation -- Fox's dance fans included -- should find plenty to enjoy. But I find McIntyre's choice of rock and pop music hinders him from reaching toward depth: he's too busy keeping up with the surface, the beat, the lyrics, the attitude, to dig further. That McIntyre's dances skirt the surface make them perfect for audiences accustomed to "SYTYCD"-style acrobatics and pop tunes reshuffled for the iPod generation.
