Category Archives: dance

The Hokey Pokey for jocks

We long ago passed the tipping point between sports and celebrity. So probably the looming all-athlete season of TV’s “Dancing With The Stars” was inevitable, the most recent nexus of a competitive dare and of jocks’ apparent addiction to applause.

What once might have seemed paradoxical—like having ventriloquists battling it out in a mime competition—now fits right into prime-time programming. You take folks who are famous for a specific skill and are convinced they can demonstrate a limitless diversity of corporeal talent, and market their not-my-job venture to a public drawn irresistibly to boldface names.

That’s entertainment. Allegedly.

It just doesn’t sound like a slam dunk: basketball Hall of Famer Kareem Abdul-Jabbar—post-career activist, cultural ambassador, outspoken figure on race and religion—now 71 years old and paired with a partner more than a foot-and-a-half shorter than his 7-foot-2. Perhaps part of the anticipated viewer appeal is similar to race car crowds counting on a spectacular crash. One of the DWTS season headliners, after all, is Tonya Harding, a person of interest in one of sport’s memorable crackups.

On a limited basis, this arrangement has been attempted for more than a decade. Football’s Emmitt Smith and Jerry Rice, basketball’s Clyde Drexler and short-track speedskating’s Apolo Ohno were among the first jocks who waltzed—or tangoed or rumbaed—onto the DWTS set.

It should be noted that the artistry of professional athletes, basketball players in particular, has been compared favorably to ballet by some principals in that discipline. And there have been plenty of reports of football pros employing bits of dance in workouts, including the ballet bars installed at the Dallas Cowboys training center to facilitate creative stretching routines. So there certainly is the possibility of cross-over aptitude.

A consumer anthropology research executive, Robbie Blinkoff, called the acceptance of “jocks in a dance competition…an enlightenment, in a way. A few years ago, it would have seemed ironic. But the old rules don’t apply.”

Furthermore, traditional expectations of what qualifies as a sport—Must there be a defense? Is choreography allowed? What about subjective judging?—have been evolving for some time. In my three decades of covering the Olympics, one constant was the negotiation over which activities were worthy of inclusion under the Games’ big tent. Candidates included Frisbee, Lifesaving (rescue dolls are used, rather than real drowning victims), artistic roller skating, dog-sled racing, water skiing, tug-of-war, aerobics. Among stranger things.

And, yes, also knocking on the Olympic door have been variations of rug-cutting and foxes trotting. Especially ballroom dancing and, most recently, break dancing. Perhaps, then, it is a logical short sock-hop to the upcoming televised dance-offs featuring Kareem; figure skating’s Harding, Mirai Nagasu and Adam Rippon; baseball’s Johnny Damon; football’s Josh Norman; luge’s Chris Mazdzer; college basketball’s Arike Ogunbowale; snowboarding’s Jamie Anderson and softball’s Jennie Finch.

Still, and not to step on any toes here, the sports-centric DWTS format really is the blurring of performance types. Acting is not singing and tightrope walking is not playing the tuba. Maybe that’s the intended charm in this show, to mix physical metaphors and dispense with a black-and-white delineation of performance expectations.

But what about old radio comic Ed Gardner’s compartmentalizing of show biz—that “an opera is when a guy gets stabbed in the back and, instead of bleeding, sings”?

Sports, recreation and dancing grannies

Public dancing in China seems an improbable pursuit to come under the heading of “sport.” But that popular routine, having stirred up controversy among some of the populace, suddenly is targeted for regulation through the Chinese government’s General Administration of Sport, according to a Wednesday report in the New York Times.

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To an uninformed Westerner who observed such frolic during a 2011 trip to Shanghai, this is surprising on a couple of levels. First of all, the activity is more diversion or recreation than some competitive physical enterprise. And, beyond that, virtually all of the participants—just having an honest good time—appear more in line for some sort of senior discount than administrative sanction.

In fact, they are widely known as “dancing grannies.” Only a small percentage of the shuffling hoofers I witnessed were male and an even smaller percentage were not-yet-eligible for retirement. At serene Fuxing Park in the pleasant section of Shanghai known as the French Concession, there was a daily gathering of small crowds—seemingly impromptu, but always in the same section of the park—grouping themselves around boom boxes that played an eclectic blend of tunes.

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Sometimes the dancers’ styles even matched the music though, just as likely, some would be tangoing to soft rock, or waltzing to disco. There were passer-by dancers, who would join the group only briefly and then move on, and committed terpsichoreans, who continued to strut their stuff—finding different partners or not—as long as there was music.

Other pastimes were scattered through the park’s various stations, each apparently reserved on a regular basis for a specific hobby preferred by greying residents. Men playing cards here, a group of folks singing opera there, not far from a knot of people engaged in tai chi (that slow-motion exercise that involves deep breathing and flowing, martial-arts poses) and, just down a path, others huddled around a speaker to engage in a little karaoke. There also was a regular outpost for a sort of banner-waving choreography, similar to those flag corps that lead marching bands.

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In short, the park was alive with energy. And on walks around the city in the evening, it was impossible not to pass other knots of dancing grannies on lots and side streets.

The story from China now is that some residents object to the amplified music central to public dancing. (It was never clear, by the way, whether the music was supplied by a designated person, or a duty somehow rotated, or provided purely by chance.)

So the General Administration of Sport, through its mass-fitness department and in conjunction with the Ministry of Culture, is poised to do something—though it isn’t clear what. Reports that standards would be issued on what type of public dancing would be allowed appear to miss the point of the noise complaints.

In the end, shouldn’t the government be a sport about this? Those dancing grannies seemed a lot livelier, and smiley-er, than sedentary sorts all too common in so many societies (including ours). The English poet Lord Byron said, “On with the dance! Let joy be unconfined.”

Revolutionary, I know.