<i>Superstars of Dance</i>: A Show With Good Intentions That Went Awry

I felt that the show's producers were doing everything they could to boost ratings: namely, having the Argentine soloist last week do nothing but shake her chest and her butt every which way.
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The TV show, Superstars of Dance, hosted by superstar Irish step dancer Michael Flatley and co-produced by So You Think You Can Dance's Nigel Lythgoe and American Idol's Simon Fuller, just wrapped up its first four week-long season with last night's finale.

I think the show had very good intentions - attempting to bring renowned dancers from around the world performing a variety of international styles to television audiences. But somehow those good intentions went awry and the show just fell flat and turned dance from art into spectacle.

The show's biggest problem for me was the competition format. I know they chose it because competition is the name of the game these days on reality TV, but it was particularly inept with so many dance forms so wholly different from one another. Last night's three solo finalists were a classical ballerina, a classical Indian dancer, and a popper. How can you possibly compare those three styles and choose a winner? You might have been able to if you were very up front on what you were judging on - expressiveness, clarity of line, clarity of intention, technique (although that will vary with each dance), ability to dramatize or act (if that is part of that particular dance), athletic ability, flexibility, partnering, strength (with the lifts especially), originality of interpretation, originality of steps, etc. But for the most part, with the exception of South African judge Harold Van Buuren toward the end of the show, the judges were never clear on what they were judging on. And, it seems to me it would be hard to do that if you didn't have an expert from each style guiding the judges. Of course it would also have been nice if those experts could have clued the audience in on what we were seeing as well. The show missed a great educational opportunity.

Another thing that bothered me about the show was the camera work. Oftentimes, the camera would home in on a dancer's face - for example, the classical Indian soloist last night - causing us to miss out on what I assume were her beautiful hand and foot gestures. You don't dance with your face, so I'm not sure why the camera operator did that. And, I don't think I was ever so mad at a TV show as I was last week when, during the South African soloist's Africanized ballet, the camera kept focusing on the aghast faces of people in the audience. I'm only assuming her dance was a combination of African and ballet because of the music - the mellifluous Western classical combined with the rhythmic African drums. Because of the intriguing music, I can imagine her dancing must have been boundary-pushing in its combination of different dance forms -- which is what art is all about - but the studio audience didn't seem to get it, and neither did we, since most of what we saw was their confused expressions. That camera work was unfair to us and to the artist.

Last week and this week, I felt that the show's producers were doing everything they could to boost ratings: namely, having the Argentine soloist last week do nothing but shake her chest and her butt every which way (before commercial breaks, the announcer encouraged audiences to return, promising that what followed would be racy), then, this week having a bikini-clad woman basically walk out on stage playing a flute to Yankee Doodle Dandy before Flatley's step-dancing performance began. What was that about? Was this a boxing match or a dance show?

We did see some brilliant dancing - namely by the Russian ballerina whose lines were beautiful, her dancing perfectly clean, and who performed those astoundingly hard whipping fouette turns with multiple pirouettes thrown in and at one point, I think (the camera was panning around so I can't be sure) changed feet and direction; the South African duo with their original and very difficult lifts requiring an incredible amount of strength, focus and balance; and the Argentine couple who performed those wicked fast hooks and danced with great precision and a passion that just melted you. I hope audiences understood how hard the fouette turns and the lifts were. The judges didn't really have any time to make any remarks last night.

If the show has another season, I hope that it will be less about flaunting nearly naked bodies and creating spectacle and more about exposing hungry audiences to the art of dance.

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