E2 EZ EE THE WASHINGTON POST.SUNDAY, AUGUST 2 , 2020
dance
BY SARAH L. KAUFMANA
fter watching the impec-
cable tutting routine by a
group called Geometrie
Variable, Ne-Yo had one
question for his fellow judges on
NBC’s “World of Dance.”
“Did you catch the chin-ogra-
phy?”
Of course they caught it.
They’d all whooped when one of
the dancers hammered his chin
like a sewing-machine needle
along the extended forearm of
another. It w as creative, witty a nd
unexpected. It also expressed an
important aesthetic principle in
dance: The smallest movements
can rock the crowd if they sur-
prise the eye, connect with the
music and touch some aspect of
our own humanity.
In the absence of live dancing,
all but extinguished by the pan-
demic, viewers can learn quite a
bit about solid performance val-
ues on Season 4 of “World of
Dance,” which airs Tuesday
nights. (There are three more
episodes left to the season —
which was filmed just before the
pandemic-related shutdowns —
including the finale, which is
Aug. 12.)
For one thing, crowd appeal —
a key factor that judges Jennifer
Lopez, Derek Hough and Ne-Yo
are measuring — isn’t confined to
extreme, acrobatic tricks, even
here. It doesn’t matter whether
dancers are competing before
millions of TV viewers for a
$1 million prize, as they’re doing
on this show, or whether they’re
soaring in an opera house or
they’ve micro-calibrated for the
small screens of Instagram and
TikTok. What sets the most inter-
esting dancers apart is a yin-yang
tension of musical responsive-
ness (watching them, we want to
be swept away) and astonish-
ment (we also want to be pulled
up short).
That’s why a small-scale dance
style like tutting, which focuses
on angular shapes of the arms,
hands and fingers, can project
unexpectedly if it’s inventive and
well directed. The three French
street dancers of Geometrie Vari-
able proved this in WOD’s “duel”
round on July 14.
They took tutting beyond the
crisp two-dimensionality in-
spired by Egyptian hieroglyphics
(the King Tut roots of its name).
Responding to Flume’s stutter-
ing, bittersweet “Never Be Like
You,” the trio sculpted itself into a
fast-paced fantasy of machines
and hinged contraptions and
even, eerily, a guillotine matched
to a chilling sound effect.
The three men barely moved
apart, working together in a
tightknit brotherhood. They
didn’t explode with crazy energy
or take up a lot of space. They
created corporeal pictures that
grew and transformed not by
virtue of muscular force, but
through intricate interconnec-
tions. That was the human, and
the most moving, dimension.
It was a taut, compact star-
burst of a performance, which
Hough rightly praised as “surgi-
cal.” And at the end, after all the
fine-tuned detail, came a surprise
that made you catch your breath:
One of the dancers broke from
the others and flew into a flip,
spinning smoothly like a coin
tossed in water.
The throughline of WOD is:
Show us something we’ve never
seen before. As a dance critic, I
want to see that, too, whenever
I’m in the theater. What new
revelation jumps out in a pre-
miere, or in a reinterpretation of
a classic work? What fresh re-
sponse is there to the music, the
setting, the story? Part of “new”
involves sheer novelty, but part of
it is also framing — how the
choreographer and the dancer
set up a moment for the best
impact. Like the tutter’s scene-
stealing chin, or the group break-
ing apart for a sudden solo back-
flip.
On WOD, there’s not a lot of
time to shine: The format is a
two-minute performance fol-
lowed by instant appraisal. So the
judges are focused and get rightto the point. This is one of the
show’s great strengths. Hough’s
forte is identifying the elements
that succeed or fail. Ne-Yo has an
eye for unusual moments. J-Lo,
with her hearty, buoyant good
humor, nevertheless cuts to the
bone: Are you going to wow
America? Can you compete
against all the others? Do you
have what it takes to win? It’s not
for nothing that she’s the boss
judge (and one of the show’s
executive producers). She makes
the simplest, clearest case for
who belongs on the show, or
doesn’t, and she draws on honest
values: the elements of her own
star power.
For example, J-Lo told one
group that when she’s putting her
own concerts together, a ballad
might be a nice part of the
package. “But if I’m going to
come out for only two minutes,”
she said while narrowing her eyes
at the lead dancer, “I’m gonna
need to slay.”
Got that, WOD hopefuls? You
have a very tiny window to im-
press. Don’t fill it with anything
less than killer material.
All of the judges zero in on the
art of drawing the eye, the ability
to make an action leap out at us
because we’ve been directed to
see it. In the qualifying rounds,
the all-female group Pumpfi-
dence did this the wrong way.
They strutted and twisted inheels to a J-Lo song, but J-Lo,
who knows more than a little
about performing in heels, told
them theirs were so high that
they were distracting.
She faulted the Dutch popping
group Oxygen for not “pushing
the boundaries” and losing the
beautifully coordinated weird-
ness that had made them stand
out.
All three judges swooned over
Styles & Emma, a highly attrac-
tive ballet duo that combined
long, stretchy flexibility with
powerful lifts and jumps. Guest
judge Stephen “tWitch” Boss was
their biggest advocate when it
came to the “redemption” round,
where they competed against Ox-
ygen. Comparing ballet and hip-
hop sounds untenable, but this
show is pretty consistent in what
it values — surprise, clean execu-
tion, a vivid relationship to the
music — so you could kind of
compare the dance styles on
those points.
Oxygen, donning hats and
gloves, fired off a snappy, stylish
number with cascades of synco-
pated precision hits rippling
through the group, and they left
everyone gasping. By contrast,
there was a sameness about
Styles & Emma, with one leggy,
gorgeously extended move after
another. The basic structure nev-
er changed: He was the target,
and she was the projectile. Twitch
had seemed to note this when he
lamented after an earlier perfor-
mance that he “wanted to see y’all
dance together more.”
It’s a request for simple human
harmony, not just the tricks.
Twitch brought the emphasis
back to an essential performance
value: the ability to touch our
own humanity. He reminded us
how good it feels when we can
connect with dancers vicariously,
on a plain, earthy, human level.
When we can see something of
ourselves in them. I’m glad
Twitch brought this to the fore;
it’s a grounding value, quite dif-
ferent from jaw-dropping ex-
tremes of physicality. Styles &
Emma were eliminated, and
while I was sorry to see them go
— as Twitch said, their art form is
underrepresented on the show —
I can understand why they were
cut. They didn’t take his note.
A sense of harmony and one-
ness ran throughout Geometrie
Variable’s routine, especially in
that chin-ography bit, with its
wacky, chummy connection be-
tween two men. The evident uni-
ty among the three dancers
helped create a performance that
was emotionally moving as well
as astonishing technique-wise.
Dancing together: On a show
that loves surprises, that may be
the biggest one of all.
[email protected]‘World of Dance’ o≠ers insights into the art — especially its human side
With live events mostly on hold, the TV show schools viewers on performance values
PHOTOS BY TRAE PATTON/NBCTOP: Dutch popping group Oxygen brings its energy to
“World of Dance.” ABOVE: Competitors Styles & Emma
offer one leggy, gorgeously extended move after another.
BELOW: Judges Ne-Yo, Jennifer Lopez and Derek
Hough measure crowd appeal, a key factor in the show.The smallest movements
c an rock the crowd if they surprise
t he eye, connect with the music
a nd touch some aspect
o f our own humanity.