Multiple Personality

The show opens with the girls unpleasantly reminding me of that Children of the Corn farmgirl number that Mia did a few weeks back. Then the boys came out with their shirts open. It’s unusual seeing a slow number as the group dance that opens Black Thursdays; I’m concerned they’re preparing me for disappointment. And I get more disappointed as that number proceeds. Kinda ugly, y’all. It’s very hard to do a group couples-adage dance, because it’s stupidly hard to get the timing of those lifts simultaneous among all the couples, and without that it looks lousy. This did look pretty lousy, and I haven’t heard who the choreographer is yet, but I’m guessing someone with a beaver fixation. Not to be crass (too late?), but between the split-leg display the girls did while in the air (and sideways) and that final lift where the boys hoisted them via the va-jay-jay, I thought it was a little, um, exotic. Not to mention it’s that everyone-looks-sad-and-dances-poignantly stuff that I think is at the low end of the interesting scale.

Cat comes out, and it’s apparent her homo-stylists have stolen the mirror ball from a gay disco in Fairbanks, fringed it up, and dressed our girl in it. Then there’s some big fan in the front row (”What, Mama, so it could blow my clothes off?” . . . anybody guess that was from Gypsy? Too gay?) and Cat spent several choice screen moments being a supermodel or hair-spokes-model, or something. Mandy Moore did the number, proving once again that her brilliant “Table” dances are few and far between. Sigh.

After Nigel and Cat plugged that online register-to-vote thing again (it went up 400% since they mentioned it last week . . . my inner cynic thinks that might mean from two to eight, but this is a big election, people! Vote Obama!), then Adam “Lamb Shank” Shankman announced that he was giving the winner of the show a featured dance role in a film he’s producing. I guess the role has yet to be written, unless it’s for a blonde-brunette-Afro-Amerasian hermaphrodite. Hey, it could happen.

I am surprised to hear myself say it, but Nigel was wonderfully encouraging and sensitive in his pre-rejection words to all the dancers. Good on ya, Toothy. Mary then said something sentimental, and then Shanky acknowledged the niceness of them all, and I started to choke up a little during the rest of his salute. Heck, everybody, they’re not dying!

Everybody’s doing un-judged little solos tonight, and I have a feeling it’s gonna be a little low-energy. Courtney started them off, and hers was on the mellow side, albeit with a couple of very pretty turn combinations.

Mark was next, and he’s still playing with his clothes. I guess he’s decided not to dancer anymore, since his whole solo seemed like his audition for either mime school or clown college. Or you could view it as him doing what makes him unique. I just wish he’d do some dancing along with it.

Katee was dancing hard, but not necessarily on center. A nice jump with a back attitude, and acting like she means it, but not above that mellow line that Courtney established.

Joshua was next, bringing a smidge of dance to tonight’s Boy Festival of Mime. I was expecting him to prove me wrong, but the mellowness sashays along.

Chelsie did some Country porn next. Well, it was a little more impressive than her Cinemax solo last night, and actually had some real dancing in it, not just the ballroom-dancer’s kick-ad-nauseum. But she does seem to have a desire to make her Mormon father suffer a cardiac arrest.

Twitched wrapped things up in the leisurely style of the evening — a moonwalk here, a campy grin there, that triple chest isolation in the middle. A walk in the park of Twitchylvania. And is it just me, or who is making his t-shirts? I think the insignias are getting a little over-the-top. I think he’s trying to develop an entire insignia clothing line. The Twitch Collection at Ross Dress for Less.

“Li’l Demon” was next, and he was cute and precocious and everything. But I couldn’t help but wonder if little kids aren’t supposed to avoid doing head spins and some of that other stuff, at least until they’re somewhat older? Don’t their bones need to set, or something? Soft spot on the top of the head? Isn’t there some reason we don’t let little kids hit the soccer ball with their heads? Somebody call Tyne Daly from Judging Amy!

Cat announced that the tour will be coming up . . . featuring the top eleven. Eleven?! I thought it was fourteen. What’s going on here? If that means that Thayyynnnne is being screwed, well — um, well, I don’t know what. I wasn’t going to the tour unless somebody gave me tickets. But they better not mess with Thayne, is all I’m sayin’.

The producers are revealing the finalists in the most suspenseful way. The two Sure Things were revealed first: Katee and Joshua are through. We’ll be finding out about who makes it through the photo-finishes after some singer named Lady Ga-Ga (does she get airplay on Radio Ga-Ga?). This is a weird performance. Some people shouldn’t have their leotards cut all the way up to their shoulders. And I guess they spent too much on the light-up Fisher Price microphone to afford costumes for the back-up dancers. But the dancing was okay. For something called ga-ga.

Here we go, kids . . . the other girl finalist is . . . Courtney. Even though that’s how I thought it should go, I have to say that Chelsie’s farewell package reminded me of how great she can be, and her words of goodbye were really quite moving.

And the boy continuing onward is . . . Twitch. Okay, that’s not what I was particularly hoping for, because I think Mark is a more complete dancer. And I wanted to see his unique qualities in the finale. But I think he sabotaged himself in his last few solos, being all-quirky at the expense of wholeness. And, anyway, Twitch looked like he was either gonna pass out or sob if he was eliminated, so maybe this was the more humane route.

It’s clear who the final two will be, as next week’s show starts winnowing them away: Katee and Joshua. And it will be very interesting to see which one of them brings that extra something that makes them the winner.

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 31st, 2008 at 10:18 pm and is filed under So You Think You Can Dance. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.