TV Gives Dance a Boost, and That’s Good, Right?

[Source: The New York Times, by Stacy Kranitz, June 7, 2010]

In the 1990s the British producer Nigel Lythgoe confronted an unanticipated and unsettling side effect to the popularity of his television series “Gladiators”: children were emulating the show’s cast members, slamming into one another on playgrounds without helmets and hurting themselves.

“I learned then that you do carry a large amount of weight on your shoulders when you produce a television show,” Mr. Lythgoe said during a recent phone interview.  “With that comes a responsibility.”

These days he is experiencing another sort of influence, one that he finds far more enjoyable.  His hit American show, “So You Think You Can Dance,” now in its seventh season on Fox, is one of several unabashedly populist competition series, including “Dancing With the Stars” and “America’s Best Dance Crew,” affecting practice in studios, rehearsal halls and stages across America.  “So You Think” winners have almost all been young generalists, able to move through a gantlet of athletic, emotive styles and short, crowd-pleasing choreographic routines.

“All of these programs have moved, I believe now, a generation,” Mr. Lythgoe said, “and certainly revitalized dance and brought if before a much larger public arena than it’s ever had before.”

No one in the dance world disputes the influence of these shows, which have given a broad swath of viewers their largest — and in some cases only — exposure to dance.  But opinions vary widely on whether the impact on the art form is largely positive or negative.

“It in a way shuts people down to dance as being anything but” slick, flashy entertainment, said David Parker, a choreographer who teaches at Juilliard, Barnard College and the Alvin Ailey School.  But he also said he was pleased to see that his students were drawing from a wider variety of dancing, sifting an array of cultural influences through their classical training.  “I didn’t notice that five years ago,” he added.

Crossover events like the Los Angeles Ballet’s “New Wave LA” program in May, which featured guest choreographers from “So You Think” and sold out the 499-seat Broad Stage twice, tend to grab most of the attention in discussions over how television is affecting dance.  But, as Mr. Parker’s remarks hint, there are quieter, more profound shifts occurring at studios.

“Your layperson who’s at home is becoming passionate about dance, wanting to know, ‘Can I do this?’ ” said Diane King, the executive director of the Broadway Dance Center, which caters to both amateurs and professionals.  “We have a beginner workshop that’s become hugely popular in the last few years, and I would credit that to the show.”

There is also a renewed investment in classes among professional dancers, who see the television shows as offering a new career path, “creating these familiar faces in the media that are the dancers or the choreographers,” Ms. King said.  That in turn has been a boon to studios like Broadway Dance Center, which are commercially inclined, appealing to those who want to work in industries like television or film, as well as, to a lesser extent, those more firmly in the concert world of dance.

“We’ve been getting requests for different kinds of dance,” Yvette Campbell, who runs the Ailey Extension program, said, laughing.  “They ask, ‘Do you offer lyrical?’ and I say, ‘Wow, I’ve danced all my life, I don’t know what that is.’  Lyrical — let me go watch ‘So You Think You Can Dance’ and find out what they’re talking about.”

Or she could hire alumni.  “I was on ‘Dance Show X’ ” has become a familiar calling card to many studio directors.

“I get a lot of people who are putting together master class tours,” said Claire Bataille, the associate director of the Lou Conte Dance Studio at the Hubbard Street Dance Center in Chicago, which offers classes to adults and teenagers from beginner level to professional.  But she, like Ms. Campbell, said that was an insufficient credential for prospective teachers; Ms. King is more accepting.

“So You Think” rewards proficiency in multiple styles, and aspiring dancers are paying attention to this, with ballet dancers dipping into hip-hop, for example, and vice versa.

These shows “expose people to more than the norm, and that is never bad,” said Mandy Moore, a choreographer who is featured regularly on the Fox show.  She also has a successful teaching career, working at places like Edge Performing Arts Center in Los Angeles, a large studio catering to professional dancers in Hollywood.  (She also choreographed for “New Wave LA.”)  She said there was a healthy shift away from what she described as the overspecialization of dancers in the 1990s.

Still, she acknowledged the danger of competition shows promoting a “good at some but master of none” mentality, and said the problems begin, in part, when “we feel we have to just keep up with the Joneses: ‘If they’re doing it on “So You Think You Can Dance” we have to offer it here.’  But you don’t always have the resources to support it, and then sometimes you get that watered-down version of training.”

A renewed interest in certain forms appears to be coming at the expense of others.  In November the choreographer Sarah Savelli published a blog post bemoaning “the systematic marginalization of tap” on “So You Think.”  Mr. Lythgoe has said in interviews and on the show that tap is too difficult to be taught quickly to nonspecialists and made into captivating television, but Ms. Savelli argued that such a trend “makes it easier for dance studio owners to pooh-pooh or omit tap training altogether.”

Ms. Moore agreed, saying she found it sad that studios and dancers feel tap is unimportant “just because it’s not on television.”  She said she and her colleagues had a responsibility to fight such perceptions.  But that’s a tough fight.

Grace McLoughlin, a Los Angeles Ballet dancer who trained at the School of American Ballet, said many of her friends are trying out for dance shows.  “It just seems so rewarding,” she said.  “Being in a ballet company, you feel you could fall by the wayside.  On TV you have people watching you and voting for you; you have an audience.”

Why, then, was she not auditioning as well?

“Honestly, I don’t think I can do all the different forms of dance they’re forced to do,” she said.  Laughing, she added: “I’ve just been training in classical dance.  It makes you feel kind of inadequate.”