Dance on TV

Last week saw a return of Dancing With the Stars, a rematch between John and Kelly. My retention of this show is a little lower than normal, because I watched half of it before evacuating for Hurricane Rita and half afterwards. Both couples did a Latin dance, a Standard dance, and a freestyle dance. IMHO, Kelly and Alec do a better job with the Latin dances, and John and Charlotte do a better job with the Standard dances. John and Charlotte's Waltz was just beautiful. It was good to see Kelly and Alec put more dance and fewer tricks into their freestyle routine; unfortunately for them, the routine they came up with was not so interesting. John and Charlotte's freestyle had all their usual charm and character, plus a Bluebird lift! I was happy to hear that John and Charlotte won this time around. It gives everyone something to feel good about. While I was at my mom's, I finally got to see an episode of "So You Think You Can Dance." The field had been narrowed to six dancers. I can't say that I particularly liked any of them, although some of them were quite good technically. The format doesn't lend itself to expressive dancing, so we saw more turning and jumping than artistry. It's great that dance is getting more exposure on TV, but is the kind of dance we want exposed? To paraphrase Monty Python: "I object to all this dancing on television. I mean, I keep falling off!"