Saturday SYTYCD: My Faves

A few weeks until the So You Think You Can Dance? finale... Here are some of the highlights this season. Catch it on FOX Wednesday nights at 8pm. You'll see that I obviously love Katee and Joshua since they appear in half of my fave dances.

Monday Musing: Utah Redux

I returned from West Coast last night. (California pictures and stories forthcoming.) Today I am embracing a Zen attitude and smiling and greeting people more, even if the favor isn't returned. Just because I live in DC, I don't have to become it. I'm always up for a cultural challenge.

Speaking of cultural challenges, my Utah friend Jeremy who is attending med school in Cleveland alerted me to the following article on the curious experience of Blacks in Utah that ran in the Washington Post yesterday. Of course, there being few African-Americans in Utah, I was not surprised that my dear friend Erika was featured it this piece!

And just in case you wanted to get a little taste of Utah, here's a snippet from So You Think You Can Dance?, the Salt Lake City auditions.



(FYI, last season's winner was a black girl from Utah!)

Friday Fave: SYTYCD?

What better way to start my vacay than watching the season premiere of So You Think You Can Dance? I am thrilled that dance has found its rightful place in American media. I am also convinced that this show could have not skyrocketed if we did not have the multicultural landscape that we have today. I mean, would a boardroom full of white men ever have put this on TV? (Ok, not to say that Fox isn't still full of white men, but the audience demand is there.)

Here's one of my faves from last season.





For the not-yet-converted the show follows the model of American Idol, so the first few weeks are chock full of freaky auditions. (Not my favorite part of the show, but entertaining nonetheless.)

Next week's show the auditions go to SALT LAKE CITY, at last putting the region on the dance map, as if the championship ballroom dance team at BYU, the reknowned dance department at the University of Utah, and the numerous national-touring dance companies based there didn't do so already.

Wildcard Wednesday: Warehouse Theatre

Here's where I went last night: The Warehouse Theater.

I went to what can be described as an open-mic for performing arts. It was mostly dance, really. Works in progress. Mostly modern dance. Some solo routines. All about the length of a pop song. A discussion with the choreographers ensued afterwards, but I had to get home on a school night.

The Warehouse Theater has been called "An Avant-Garde Kennedy Center." It's mostly empty at the moment as they are slowly shutting down this location due to rising property taxes and will relocate in Columbia Heights. You can read all about that here.

There are still a few things going on there. The next of these "open mic" nights is Tuesday, June 3rd. $5 is a good price for a fair amount of entertainment value and for an hour or two that feels like you are no longer in DC.

Sunday Solace: Intro. to Social Dance

Dance classes can make or break a couple. In Wood and my case, I think it did both. We started our Intro. to Social Dance (a.k.a. Ballroom) class the Saturday before last. While we sailed through class number one with relative ease, class two became more challenging and by its end, Wood and I were not happy dancers.

Of course, we didn't immediately pinpoint our frustration on the teacher who had been late for both classes, effectively cheating us out of 1/4 of our dance time, adding to the pressure of learning something new in a rush, but named each other and stepping on eachothers' feet/getting one's feet stepped on as the culprit. It is so easy to blame the other with something so intimate as partner dancing. And it just melted down from there.

After said meltdown, and I won't go into the gory details, we took a deep breath and did a pretty decent job of pressing the reset button on our evening. After dinner at one of our favorite unpresumptuous restaurants Astor Cafe and dessert at the even less fancy Baskin-Robbins, we ended up finding the perfect place to try out our new moves---at the bus stop! (Yet again, public transportation creeps into my blog.) We then practiced in our sockfeet in the foyer of Wood's apartment building, so that even if we DID step on eachothers' feet, it didn't hurt as much. And it was a metaphor for our general increased forgiveness for eachothers' imperfections.

They don't let you take pictures inside the studio, probably because of the delicate partner relations that happen there.

Back Home: NY 2 DC

Back in DC from NY.... I do *heart* NYC and how different it is from DC. And Wood is tired of hearing it. (God bless him.) I also thank him for humoring me by being my guest at the Joyce Theater, the place to see modern dance. I took him to Ronald K. Brown/Evidence dance company. While the dance is even more interesting with music, I only could find this one clip on You Tube from Summerstage. It gave me the craving to do African dance again.

More on our trip shortly.

Zumba Queens

For a good sweatfest, I do Zumba at least once a week. If you have yet to hear of Zumba, it's an exercise trend based on Latin, hip-hop and other world dance. (I personally get a kick out of watching our instructor Diego execute belly-dance moves. I swear his hips are double-jointed!) These Zumba Queens (and Diego) were gracious enough to dance for the camera today.