Great TV but it's not all dance
By Susan WalkerDANCE WRITER
Tue., Nov. 25, 2008timer3 min. read
By any measure applied to TV programs, So You Think You Can Dance Canada has to be rated one of the most successful shows ever produced in this country. Six weeks into the series, launched on Sept. 11, the show came in as No. 1 of all the new fall programs. The three performance episodes were averaging 1.36 million viewers and SYTYCDC was rated the top show for women, younger viewers and urban markets.
Dancers and choreographers struggling to bring audiences into theatres must be a little peeved, or at least a touch envious. But they shouldn't fume because watching this show, even witnessing a taping of it, has little to compare with the experience of attending a live dance performance.
So You Think You Can Dance has spawned a new genre: TVDance, a close relative of music video. There's almost nothing live about it. Even when you're sitting in the bleachers in the cavernous Lake Shore Blvd. studio where the competitors charge through their numbers, it's the screen you tend to watch, not the performance, frequently obscured in any case by creeping cameramen trolling for close-ups.
The performers are dancing for the camera, after all. You just have to take the judges' word for it that some of these couples are generating enough heat to singe the skirts on the young women ranged around the catwalks above the stage. (Those dancers who don't are invariably enjoined to "take it to another level.")
The dancing looks great, but there's no emotional connection between performers and audience. For that, you would have to attend an actual dance concert: last Saturday's flamenco performance by Mercedes Ruiz comes to mind.
Granted, the judges are in a much better position – right on the set – to really feel something and notice more than the dancers' amply exposed young bodies.
(Last Wednesday night, Lisa Auguste and Nico Archambault's sexy jazz-funk number choreographed by Blake McGrath caused American guest judge Dan Karaty to comment, "They wouldn't allow that (on the air) in the States.")
Some of the judges really know what they're talking about, and you can learn from their comments what makes great dancing. Jean-Marc Généreux, for one, obviously knows everything about ballroom dancing. When Rex Harrington, artist-in-residence at the National Ballet of Canada, is on the show, he gives really good feedback to the dancers on how to improve their performances.
But make no mistake: the judges are performing just as hard as the competitors. This is how TVDance works. Their enthusiasm never wanes; they talk as if they're in love with the dancers. On last Wednesday's show, Généreux was positively postcoital, tearing up as he stood to give a slow clap and tell Natalli Reznik and Vincent Noiseux that their execution of Stacey Tookey's contemporary piece was "the best performance of the night."
Tookey's piece was engaging choreography that would stand up on a theatre stage. But not a lot of what gets danced on SYTYCDC is as earth-shattering as the judges and producers would have you believe. The dancers justify the high praise they've been earning all round, but if this show was called So You Think You Can Choreograph, it would be a different story. Too often the routines, like the krump number where the dancers impersonated cat burglars, are gimmicky and require more acrobatic than dance skills. But that's TVDance for you.
It really does look pretty exciting on the small screen. And if So You Think You Can Dance Canada can entice more people to go and see dance in a theatre or, as Harrington comments, if competitors like Archambault (an audience favourite) encourage boys to "put down their hockey sticks and start dancing," then more power (and higher ratings) to it.