Dance Like Someone is Watching - Please!!

I’m sad that Season Eight of “So You Think You Can Dance” has wrapped up.  For me it’s the TV highlight of the summer.  If you aren’t familiar with it, it isn’t the competition with stars who are partnered with professional ballroom dancers.  It’s the one with talented young dancers who compete in all kinds of styles with all kinds of partners.  It always amazes me how good they are and how versatile some of them can be across dance genres.  The choreography by some top-ranked people is first rate as well and even the judges are interesting.  And then there is the gorgeous, warm, and TALL Cat Deeley who hosts the show. She’s just fabulous!  These comments are all my opinion, of course.  A recent article in the New York Times annoyed me with some cranky comments about the program.  But the numerous Emmy nominations the show has received back up my thoughts that SYTYCD is pretty great.  In fact, watching the show, I have a touch of envy toward those young people with stars in their eyes, arabesque-ing into dance glory.

I longed to be a dancer when I was a kid. I begged my parents for ballet lessons. I was enthralled by ballerinas when they appeared on the Ed Sullivan show. My brother told me years later that my Dad wasn’t crazy about the whole idea because he didn’t want some male dancer having his hands on my butt (in the lifts! You knew that was what I meant!)  So they enrolled me in Highland dancing instead.  

Now, Highland dancing, accompanied by the skirl of the pipes, is a bracing, noble art form, born in Scotland where many of the dances were performed by Highland soldiers on the eve of battle. So, although it is frankly quite absurd for a 7 year old girl to be pounding the floor around the crossed tips of broad swords, I was proud of participating in this dance  – and even won a couple of medals in competition.

But I saw myself in a tutu and pointe shoes, not in a kilt and men’s battle regalia, for heaven’s sake!

However, my youth, anorexic as it was, (I was SO suited to a life in the ballet) passed and then so did my young adult hood.  I fulfilled my ballet dreams – well almost – when I finally enrolled in an adult class at the Royal Winnipeg Ballet in my university years. Without the training that starts at age 3, the dream was quickly shattered by the sight in the mirrors of the dozen of us adult dancers, barely air-borne in jetés, groaning into pliés, and reeling dizzily endeavoring to tournant. It was more comedic than elegant. Not a pretty sight.

Next came my tap years.  I started in my mid-30s and only gave it up, twenty odd years later, in 2009 when my ankles became terminally inflamed. I was passionate about tap. I loved it. A friend once referred to it as chuckling with one’s feet.  It is all that and more. It is rhythm and beat — the soul of music played out by the percussion of your feet. It is the dance personification of jazz.

That is, unless you are performing in a suburban dance school recital.

Perhaps you’ve been to one of these excruciating extravaganzas.  If you have you know what they’re like: long hours in an airless, non-air conditioned school auditorium watching endless 3 minute dance numbers by every age group, waiting, in boredom, until your loved one appears for their 3 minutes in the spotlight.

 If you are an adult dancer in this scenario, you don’t so much find yourself channeling the greats of Tap History or the soul of music as you do find yourself in a “novelty number” — pretty much in the “Good Sport” category receiving audience approval for: “well, good for them for getting up and doing that!”  You will be upstaged by the show-off four- year olds in their Bumble Bee costumes who elicit “awww”s from the audience. And you will likely be scheduled to be onstage immediately following the teens who are in training to be pole dancers.

So, there you are, in your middle years, in a be-glittered and be-dazzled costume, in some number dreamt up by your instructor to go with the recital theme that asks you to be a Spanish lady, or a nun, or a schoolgirl, or a schoolgirl who becomes a nun, or a tourist on a cruise ship, a pizza cook, a cocktail (I was a Pink Lady once), a cowgirl, or a hillbilly in Daisy Duke denim short shorts and a tank top (not a good look on the over-50 set!)

I can only be grateful that I never found myself in a number like the one that won a tap competition I attended once.  Taking first prize was a group of 20 giant pink chickens and a skunk. Their music was “Nobody Here but Us Chickens.”  Yes, 21 middle aged ladies in giant pink feathered costumes with huge bright yellow beaks, plus one overgrown black and white skunk that “got into the hen house.”  I’m not making this up.  Their dance was more a drill team routine than a tap number.  When the judges announced the winning team, these 21 women hugged and squealed and jumped up and down in unison.  Their victory dance was a better performance than their competition routine.  I remember thinking to myself, “There is no justice!”  To have lost to pink chickens was the low point of my dance career.

So, now I watch the talented young things on SYTYCD and think how lucky they are to be doing what they love to do, performing serious choreography, launching their dance careers, and wearing some pretty smashing-looking costumes!  May they never be asked to be pink chickens.