So You Think You Can Dance?

I watched the season 7 finale of So You Think You Can Dance tonight. I've never followed the show before, but this season, I watched on and off. The sheer strength and beauty of these dancers is beyond belief. I was never, on my best day, as good as these kids on their worst days, but still it makes me long for the days when I used to dance!

I learned ballet, tap, and jazz, starting at age 4. I still can recall the ballet terms, and while standing at the sink washing dishes will find myself doing plies and tendus and battements and frappes. I can remember my twenty-one one-sounds from tap. I remember the day I auditioned for the company, and how nervous I was. I was nine, and terrified, but I made it! It turned my dance career from one-hour a week to several hours over several days a week.

Ballet is a beautiful thing, and when done "properly", it is regal. Watching a prima ballerina perform is like watching BB King play the blues or Babe Ruth hitting home runs. It can inspire feelings in even the most emotionally-stunted people, and it's simply live art work. Mikhail Baryshnikov was my idol as a young girl. He fascinated me. You can see a video here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1yedtUaNLkA of him dancing with Natalia Makarova, in a pas de deux (dance for two) from Tchaikovsky's The Sleeping Beauty. He was ground-breaking.

Tap, though... tap is a different animal entirely. Tap could be rigid, it could be fluid, but it's all about rhythm and sound. Tap might have been my first real "love"... Every number I ever performed that I would consider a *favorite* was a tap number. If ever I possessed any true skill in the varied arts of dance, it was in tap, and whenever I think about returning to dancing, it's always tap that I want to do.

Eleanor Powell and Fred Astaire were arguably one of the best duos of all time, though anybody that Mr. Astaire partnered was automatically made even more fabulous, just for dancing with him. The Nicholas Brothers, Bill "Bojangles" Robinson, Gene Kelly, Sammy Davis, Jr, Gregory Hines, Savion Glover... all timeless, and all masters of their craft. Fred Astaire was inspired by men like The Nicholas Brothers and Bill Robinson, and was a classy, talented white man in a field which was traditionally African-American. There is a joy that comes from watching him dance, and when I see Savion Glover dance nowadays, it brings me the same joy.

If there's anything not-health-related inspiring me to get thin and healthy again, it's the thought of perhaps being able to dance again!