Ombailamos

in the game

I am not a sports fan, in the sense of watching a lot of sports.  I've never sat through an entire live game of any kind except for one Clippers game.  It's not that I don't like sports: it's just that games don't hold my interest when, shall we say, unedited. 

The one glaring exception is, of course, ballroom dancing - I have sat through entire daylong competitions quite happily, but then there is a new event every ten minutes or so, plus great music and great costumes, plus dancing is something that I actually do and understand.  I can barely catch a football, much less throw it across a field, and that surely influences my interest level.

I love sports movies, though.  There is a long list of sports movies I'll happily watch over and over again.  I don't care if the story arc is predictable.  I don't mind that these are predominantly male-oriented.  In fact, generally speaking I think the typical sports movie is less predictable and less stereotype-driven than the typical "chick flick," which on the snore scale I'd place with 80's action movies.

I'm not picky about which sport, either.  We just watched "The Rookie," with Dennis Quaid; great baseball movie.  Not long ago it was "Miracle," with Kurt Russell, who I usually avoid but who was terrific in this.  Last year we watched a marathon of "The Cutting Edge" and its two sequels, which are basically romances but the skating competition gives them a little, well, edge.  "Hoosiers."  "The Replacements."  "Stick It." "The Express."  "The Hammer." "Love and Basketball." "Bull Durham."  "Any Given Sunday."

Maybe one of the reasons I like sports movies is that the best ones are often based on true-life stories.  They have to clean things up, reduce the number of characters, whatever; but the real drama of training, competition, and relationships suit the film format admirably.  These stories also take place in the real world, not in the artifical World of Movies, i.e. big cities full of overly well-groomed people, which means that "character" actors get cast instead of the same ten "A-list" people.

What I'm waiting for is a movie about the real world of competitive ballroom dancing.  "Strictly Ballroom," "Dance with Me," and "Shall We Dance" touched on it, but so far the movie that best played on both the dramatic possibilities of competition and the transformative possibilities of dance was "Mad Hot Ballroom."  Fortunately, until something new comes along, I have my DVD library to sustain me.

the science of the stretch

Flexibility is, to me, where fitness begins and ends.  You can't achieve full range of movement without developing flexibility; you can't have true health without it, either.

Every tissue in the body, with the exception of bone and gray matter, has some potential extensibility, meaning it can move with the body.  Many people think of flexibility as something you either have or not, but the truth is it can be developed and improved at any time of life.

Kinesiology studies have concluded that the limits of extensibility are probably established by around age 12.  This means that the outer limits of your tissues are determined by then.  Most people don't know what those limits are, though, because at that time of life, unless they are engaged in ballet or gymnastics, they don't explore their physical limits in any organized way.  And that's why it's desirable to begin training in ballet or gymnastics during childhood, because the work that you do then can increase your limits of extensibility.

After age 12, anyone who does the work can discover those limits.  The older you are when you begin, the more slowly and gently you must approach this work.  No matter what your age, it is potentially dangerous to begin serious flexibility work unsupervised.

All of the extensible tissues are subject to injury if work is too intense, or too fast, or is not properly paced with rest and recovery.  An overstrained ligament or tendon or muscle can set back a fitness program by months.  Work in the upper chest and neck should be approached with extra caution, since the fragile cervical vertebrae and essential blood vessels coincide in that area.  Work in the trunk should be thoughtful and gentle, since visceral organs have been known to actually adhere to each other after lengthy periods of inactivity.

It should also be understood that flexibility work should not be limited to one part of the body.  It's not a good idea to approach it thinking, I just want to touch my toes or turn my head easily.  What's more, this work is going to wax and wane.  The body reacts to new demands with protest and indignation.  Working up to your limits will likely cause soreness, odd imbalances, changes to sleep or appetite, and possibly crankiness.  You may find that other fitness practices have to be modified to accommodate how you feel on a particular day.

Every time you work on flexibility, approach it attentively.  Take note of whether you are actually at your limit, or just meeting resistance.  Once you feel resistance, rest there for a couple of slow breaths and try to relax into it.  Then you may be able to push through the resistance.  This work should never go beyond discomfort into actual pain.

Achieving improved flexibility typically results in improved posture, speed, agility, balance, and even strength - because the body can recruit muscle more effectively.  It's well worth exploring at any age.

the wedding dance

I have the pleasure of working with a wedding couple right now who are so dedicated to doing a Good Dance, they started six months in advance.

Because they were willing to put in so much work, they are going to be able to do some complicated choreography, to a challenging piece of music, and make it look great.  So many wedding couples set up a lesson or two a couple of weeks before the event, and end up doing the hug-and-shuffle to one of the same-old, same-old songs.

Now, I know that the wedding dance is not that important to many (if not most) couples.  It's just a couple of minutes out of the whole event, after all.  But I think with dance on TV, and some of the dances that are popping up on YouTube, wedding couples are getting a little more ambitious.

Which is great, but listen up: it takes time to learn a choreographed routine.  It takes more time to understand how to actually dance the routine.  And it takes even more time to dance the routine to specific music in a way that's going to please you when you look at that video ten years from now.

Choosing music is something that I think gets overlooked.  For people who aren't already dancers, choosing a piece of music just because it's "a wedding song" may be counterproductive.  There are great, romantic, wedding-appropriate songs in every single genre of music.  Latin, hip-hop, R&B, country, even hard rock - there are terrific songs that any creative teacher could use to design a wedding dance that the couple can really connect with.

So first, choose music you really love from a genre that you really enjoy, and second, plan ahead.  If you want it to look decent, give yourselves six lessons.  If you want it to look great, give yourselves twelve or more.  Nothing about the wedding day should be a throwaway, and learning a dance can provide that hour or two a week for the couple to really concentrate on each other and remember why they are doing all this!

adios a Miami

I was soooo disappointed to lose Janette from SYTYCD this week.  The other three girls are great, but I thought Janette brought such a bright presence ... these lyrical/contemporary girls have terrific technique but to me, they all tend to look alike after a while.  I am going to have to transfer my want-to-win vibes to Melissa, for her maturity.

Of the three remaining girls, only one (Kayla) has turned in a really good ballroom performance - that samba at the beginning of the season.  I suspect a lot of that was due to her partner.  Why is ballroom dancing so hard for these talented, well-trained dancers?

Mr. P and I were discussing that and we have a couple of theories.  I think what it boils down to, though, is in lyrical and contemporary dancing, the partnering is all choreography, and the choreography rules the performance.  If it's a partner piece, each movement is defined for the dancers by the choreographer, and changing anything - any piece of styling, any arm position, any facial expression - might substantively change the dance.  There's only so much of the dancers' own personality or relationship that should be brought to the performance.

In ballroom, the routine may be choreographed, but the fact that the partners are working within specific figures (that a judge must be able to recognize) means that the partnering is more than half of the performance.  The figures, footwork, body actions to a certain extent, and even arm stylings may be predetermined by the dance genre.  Cha-cha arm stylings, for example, are subtly different from rumba or mambo or any other latin dance, and all latin dances are different from any of the smooth or standard dances.  This raises the difficulty level for lyrical/contemporary dancers, since they are used to drawing on the same dance vocabulary for every performance and you can't do that in ballroom.  Each ballroom dance has its own character.

What this means is that you can't just create any old movement and call it a cha-cha or a waltz.  You have to use movements that make sense in that genre.  Whence the individuality of a performance really derives is thus the partnering.  And lyrical/contemporary dancers, at the ages of most SYTYCD contestants, simply don't have the experience in life OR in dancing to create expressive partnering.  It seems, in most SYTYCD ballroom performances, that just getting the foot placements and body actions is such a challenge that the contestants can't manage more than a broad caricature of the dance's character.

There are always exceptions, of course.  Last season, Courtney turned in great rumba performances with both Gev and Joshua.  But I think one of the reasons Debbie Allen is so done with paso doble is that most of the contestants can't really express these dances unless they already have a ballroom background, and all the pasos end up looking the same.

That's my theory, anyway.  And that's why I'll really miss Janette, because with all her energy and brightness, she brought that understanding of partnering.  If Evan had given her something to work with, that last rumba would have been a completely different animal and I think we would have seen someone else going home.

recreation

This week there are several interesting dance things happening.  First, I'm teaching the third of three Samba classes for Ballroom by the Bay on Wednesday.  Then, on Thursday, the Santa Monica Pier's centennial celebration goes big with "La Monica Ballroom Redux."  Saturday night there's a party at L.A. Dance Experience, plus an outdoor Swing Thing in Pasadena.

In a couple of weeks (August 9) the Los Angeles chapter of USA Dance is hosting another big party at the Culver City Memorial Auditorium.  They'll have a cha-cha lesson from Alec Mazo and Edyta Sliwinska.

There are more and more social dance events in Los Angeles these days, classes are full, dance on TV is huge.  It's great!  Dancing is such an inexpensive social activity, and such a great way to expand your circle.  It's fun, it's creative, it's good exercise.  There really is no downside.

One of the great things about being an adult is that you really can decide exactly how you want to spend your free time.  Unfortunately, a lot of us get so caught up in things we think we "ought" to do, that we stop thinking about what we want to do.  Maybe it's keeping the house tidy, or taking care of kids, or catching the latest episode of Gossip Girl.  Just stuff that we do because it's there, because it needs to be done (well, except for Gossip Girl).

The thing about doing what's there, and not thinking about what else we might choose, is that a lot of time can go by.  We find ourselves at midlife having done a lot of things that just came up, and maybe we've completely forgotten things that we thought, way back when we had a little more time to dream, we *had* to do.

Well, it's my recommendation that, during the next few weeks, everyone give themselves a night off.  Find one of the 15+ free concert series near you and go hear some live music.  Have a glass of wine or a cappucino at a new coffee shop, in a neighborhood you've driven through but never stopped in.  Take advantage of some of the great things about our crazy city that we often leave unexplored until relatives come to visit.

Get a little recreation.  And if it happens to include dancing, so much the better.

climbing the pole

This week on "Dance Your Ass Off," week one's top finisher was eliminated after losing almost no weight and turning in a lackluster performance.  One of the judges was spot on in remarking that the contestant clearly didn't think of herself as sexy.  This turned out to be a major weakness when performing with a stripper pole.

The contestants mostly had moderate weight-loss numbers again, but the performance level for most was quite a bit higher.  Maybe having a prop (and that extra support) helped, or maybe this was a challenge so ridiculous that they had to just go with it.

Now, about that sexiness thing.  Some counseling might be called for.  The dance format is engineered to compel confronting the physicality of life.  It's just impossible to ignore your body's limitations when you are trying to use it to express something.  But where most of the contestants seemed to feel liberated by the stripper pole, the eliminated girl clearly felt exposed.  Kind of sad.

Meanwhile, over at So You Think You Can Dance, Janette has confirmed herself as my personal favorite.  All the contestants danced superbly in the extremely difficult group numbers.  Most of the solos were unintelligible; I was most impressed with Jason, Jeanine, the aforementioned Janette, and Brandon, who came out with such ferocity I thought he was Ade for a second.

There are very few routines I haven't liked, over the seasons, but I didn't care for this week's paso doble.  The music choice and choreography were not any more demanding than past pasos, but the execution was pretty weak.  I agreed with most of the judges' comments for most of the routines and cannot decide who I least want to see perform next week.  I do know I want to see Janette.  Mas salsa, por favor!

Incidentally, any salsa student out there who has been taught to turn in their toes - please watch Janette's salsa solo about one million times.  There is no reason club dancing cannot be technically correct.  Her foot and leg action is beautiful and she combined elements of salsa, cha-cha, samba, and even tango.  That is a standard of excellence worthy of stage and screen, indeed.

King Solomon's Mines

After reading "Kim" not long ago, I determined that I really ought to read some of the other classic adventure literature I own.  Of course, then life intervened and I've barely had time to keep up with my magazines.  However, I did have the mental wherewithal to set the DVR for "King Solomon's Mines" when it came up on TCM, and when we finally sat down to watch it I also opened the book by H. Rider Haggard.

Often films made in the 1950s seem horribly dated, but this one held up pretty darn well.  It won two Academy Awards, and lost out as Best Picture to "All About Eve," which was probably the best movie of any given five years let alone one.  Stewart Granger (rather fine!) apparently got the lead role of Allan Quartermain (in the book it's "Quatermain") because Errol Flynn didn't want to go to Africa.  Instead, Flynn took a role in ... "Kim"!

The story involves a trek into deepest, uncharted Africa in 1897.  The film diverges from the book in its setup; in the film, it's a guilty widow searching for her lost husband who hires Quartermain for the safari; in the book, it's a guilty brother.  The film's setup provides a role for Deborah Kerr and some romance, which was probably considered necessary; in the book, the only romance is between one of the trekkers and a native woman. 

The book is considerably more violent and, as books tend to be, more detailed.  It is not as tightly written as "Kim" but quite entertaining; the narrator is Quatermain himself and he is not the heroic manly man of the film, but a late-middle-aged, selectively educated, self-deprecating true lover of Africa and its wonders.  Given the time the book was written and the time the movie was made, both are remarkably free of racism.  Many of the major set pieces were taken directly from the book.

There's always a lot of chat, during the summer, about the decline and fall of filmmaking, recycled stories, etc.  I suspect many people in the movie business may not read very much, but there are a lot of great stories, where stuff actually happens (don't get me started on "book club" style literary fiction), that people used to read in school.  Many of these are ideally suited to film. 

And here's another point - if it seems a bit creatively bankrupt to revive an action franchise in the 2000s that last hit the screen in the early 1990s, perhaps we might reach back a bit.  There is plenty of great material that's only been recycled once in a hundred years!

compare and contrast

I am always on the lookout for new music, and one of my frequent sources is soundtrack albums.  A particularly good soundtrack came from the movie "Out of Time," starring Denzel Washington, Eva Mendes, Dean Cain, and Sanaa Lathan.  What a gorgeous cast!

The movie is a good old-fashioned suspense thriller.  Denzel's character does some stupid things, but they are realistically stupid things - things people do when they are trying to help other people but don't think it through.  Eva is smart and competent (as usual), Dean is loathsome (he's quite good in this), and Sanaa has the juicy part of the duplicitous femme fatale.  It's a really effective movie and probably cost twenty bucks to make, aside from paying the actors and commissioning the music.

On the flip side, there is "Transformers 2," which Mr. P and I saw last weekend.  I couldn't tell you what the music is like, because there is so much other noise going on!  In the past five years or so, I've really let down my guard when it comes to mainstream movies.  I still like the "quality" pieces like "The Express" or "Bottle Shock," but I can't deny I am entertained by fast-paced, nonsensical action-adventure stuff.

One of my favorite things about Transformers 2 was the nice big part for John Turturro, one of those actors who often plays the brainy geek/misfit.  Since Shia LaBoeuf's character is also a misfit, and the character of his (cute) roommate even more so, it was fun to see an elder statesman of misfitness taking on the big bad alien robots. 

The only real eye-rolling thing about the movie for me (being someone who willingly suspends disbelief) was the lame setup for the sequel, where (SPOILER ALERT!) after all that drama about Optimus' resurrection and taking out The Fallen, he lets two of the baddies get away.  Come on, people.  You've just established that good or bad is a choice (thank you, it's nice to have that pointed out) and that these robot guys also choose their own cultural representation, so why not just have one of the good guys go bad next time?  Why be lazy?  Tsk tsk.

doing the work

This week brought another episode of "Dance Your Ass Off," and everybody danced disco, which was kind of fun.  Everybody also showed a distinct loss of momentum in the real point of the exercise, i.e. losing weight.

What this says to me is either that the nutritional and fitness guidance these contestants are getting is much less tough-love than on The Biggest Loser, or these contestants are much less compliant.  I wonder if the nutritionist, for example, is telling them the awful truth: in order to lose a lot of weight fast, you need to severely cut calories.  Basically, in order to maintain a weight of 300 pounds, you have to consume 3000 calories a day.  If you weigh 300 pounds and you want to weigh 200, you need to cut your consumption to 2000 calories.  You have to feed the body you want, not the body you have.

As to exercise ... there's an awful truth here, too.  The average person - that is, the person who is not an elite athlete - can't eat 3000 calories a day and burn off 1000 by exercise, not sustainably.  If you are 100 pounds overweight, you are not going to be physically able to burn that many calories through exercise on a daily basis without serious risk of injury.  The exercise that these contestants are doing should be focusing on correcting body mechanics and supporting the activity of dancing.  The show doesn't air enough workout footage to see what they are up to, but if much bigger weight-loss numbers don't post next week, I'd say they're not airing it because they don't have it.

Weight management is really simple: the crude formula requires 10 calories per pound of weight to  maintain; to lose weight, calorie burn has to exceed calorie intake.  To lose a lot of weight, let's face it, you're going to be hungry a lot of the time.  (But keep in mind, people often mistake fatigue or thirst or boredom for hunger.)  Likewise, fitness is really simple: use it or lose it, and the more you move (with more intention, with more variety), the fitter you will be.  But simple is not the same as easy.

I still think framing a weight-loss contest around dancing was smart, but it won't be a repeatable experiment if they don't get the results they want.  Ultimately, I don't think the contestants really want to come on TV, do a couple of dances, and then go home having lost ten pounds.  And I don't think the producers really want to give their sizable prize to someone who dances well but still is 100 pounds overweight.

I am hoping that the contestants have had a little prayer meeting with their coaches - and, ideally, a psychologist.  Getting to 100 pounds (or more) of overweight doesn't happen overnight, and it can't be reversed overnight.  A couple of these contestants have shown signs of understanding that their own behavior is responsible for the overweight, and - even more importantly - of understanding that they can identify and change their unhealthy behaviors. 

Other contestants don't seem to have a clue that they have the power in this situation; they seem to view the overweight as something external to them.  It's like the contestant featured in promos for the new, horrible version of The Bachelor, "More to Love," who says "I want to be loved for me."  She's all teary-eyed and in total denial that those extra pounds ARE HER.  That's her body, which she created, which she hates and wants to be loved in spite of.  It's a totally unrealistic and damaging way to view the body, which is the source of all our pleasures in life.  Think about it: vision, scent, hearing, touch, taste, movement, sex, appetite, breath, intelligence: all functions of the body.  Is that not worth doing some work for?

It is always possible.  It is simple.  It just isn't easy.  It takes work.  "It" is health and fitness, and everyone has the power and potential to be a more fit, more healthy version of themselves.  Even Lance Armstrong, who never exactly got out of shape, had to go back into training to enter the Tour this year.

We shouldn't let the fact that something is difficult determine whether we make the attempt.  Learning to manage calories is a lot less difficult than learning to dance.  If learning to manage calories makes it possible to dance ... well, I'd be pretty motivated.  I hope these contestants are, too.

the top ten

I haven't been writing regularly about season 5 of So You Think You Can Dance, in part because there are many others covering it and in part because my dance education is limited to ballroom.  I mean, I know the language of ballet/contemporary, and some of the movements, and I could probably fake my way through hip-hop choreography, but I can't do what the SYTYCD dancers do, and I don't want to talk about it just for the sake of talking about it.

That said, I want to talk about the top ten.  I was a little bit afraid that Philip Chbeeb (who I really like, by the way) would not be in the bottom three this week ... even though it seemed that his dance assignments were calculated to put him there.  (Come on, do we really think the assignments are random?)  However, he was, and I was relieved that the judges made the choice to eliminate him at this stage.  As he himself acknowledged, Philip does not have the dance chops to warrant keeping him over Ade or Jason.  I'm happy he'll be on the tour, and I loved his last solo (great music choice!), and I'm sure we'll see more of him.

Nigel said that this season, the top 20 group has not produced real stars - yet.  I have to disagree with that.  I think Brandon and Janette have been outstanding.  Their routines this week were as entertaining as anything the past champions have done.  It will be really enlightening to see how they respond to changing partners.  Brandon has excellent skills and Janette is a chameleon, and they have both approached their routines with total, fearless commitment.  She is also one of the most interesting individuals - smart, realistic, and focused; someone who has pursued excellence in her dance style while also pursuing an education for that day, always threatening in a dancer's life, when she'll need to make her living from a desk chair.

I am also looking forward to seeing how Melissa and Ade work with other partners.  She's done remarkably well for a ballet specialist, but I feel we haven't yet seen Ade's full potential.  That solo tonight gave us a taste.

Finally, I've found it interesting that this season there were many fewer hip-hop dancers in the top 20.  I believe we can point to "America's Best Dance Crew" for an explanation there.  The producers probably feel that with another show devoted exclusively to hip-hop, and with the ability of well-trained technical dancers to successfuly adapt to hip-hop choreography on SYTYCD, they didn't need to emphasize that so much in the casting process. 

Oh, one last note ... is it just me, or has Nigel said "without question" about 10 times per episode this season?