Yes. And when there’s more than one person on the stage, show them all at once so we can see the ensemble, not just one guy’s face.
The problem with the videography is that the producers don’t entirely believe that the people watching actually like dance enough to want to be able to see what the dancers are doing, so they through in all this other crap that may make for pretty images on the screen, but don’t do diddly for showing dance.
Now that the field is thinned out a bit, they’re giving the judges a little more time to comment, which I appreciate. (What if the Chinese judge actually does speak English and is just doing some weird postmodern performance art thing on the behavior of TV performance judges?)
My favorite moment last evening – when they brought out the Indian soloist to stand next to the Aussie soloist to see which would be eliminated … wow. That was a visual.
Dunno why everyone hated the South African pair so much – I thought they were phenomenal, despite the “tricksiness” of what they were doing.
TurboDog and I were laughing last night, wondering if Nigel Lithgoe pulled the judges aside and explained a bit about hip hop and popping to them.
We also wondered if the South African pair didn’t suffer a little blowback from the South African judge being so harsh in his scores and comments for the other dancers. (We did think the South African pair was amazing, but other than the series of lifts, there was little actual dancing going on, and the scores were deserved.)
We have much love for the buffonish Russian judge. That guy can sure wear a purple velvet shirt, can’t he? 
The African Swan Lake was pretty damned odd.
I think I might be confused – the Irish contingent is at the top of the leaderboard, but doesn’t have anyone left in the competition?
Odd, that.
It partially results from the way they ‘carry over’ scores for all level.
The first round, each country got four scores. Then they cut the lowest scorers, so the next round the countries only got points for:
Australia - 3
India - 3
Ireland - 3
South Africa - 3
USA - 3
Argentina - 2
Russia - 2
China - 1
Then, there isn’t that much range in the scores – I think they’ve all been in the 56 to 64 point range – so a country could have all its performances ranked fourth and thus rack of lots of points, while the other countries can have a single top three placer with the others much lower, keeping their total points lower than Ireland’s.
Going into the final round we have USA and Australia with two performances (and thus will inevitably finish 1st and 2nd overall unless the dancers fall off the stage or something), Ireland with zero (last place), and the rest with one performance each (3rd to 7th.)
The overal country score is really a meaningless thing, IMHO. A slightly better way would be to track average scores instead.
The African Swan Lake was painful. I think that performance had the most audience shots of any we’ve seen so far, and every single face was all “WTF???” The Russian judge (and soloist) must’ve been seething.
Did the US and Irish judges have a falling out/lovers’ quarrel? 'Cause at the beginning they were all buddy-buddy, and now not only is the Irish judge typically sitting with his back to the US judge, they’re no longer voting anywhere near the same. Add in the mysterious choosing of the Australian group over the Irish*, and it seems to point to some sort of spat.
- A crime, IMNSHO. The Australian group has been nowhere near as consistent or entertaining as the Irish group; plus that Australian redhead that moves like a linebacker scares me.
They were miles better than the Americans last night (I know I’m showing my age, but hiphop so totally does nothing for me). I can only assume that last vote was rigged to give the win to the U.S. :rolleyes:
At least the popper came in third on the solos – he’s a great performer, but he’s not a dancer.
Kicking out the Irish team was the last straw, in my opinion. There is a whole bunch that is wrong with this show, but that they kicked out the one performance of the evening that even remotely entertained me… whatever. I have better things to do with my time.
Also, am I the only one that noticed that the Russian couple was completely new? Previously they had on Pasha and Anya from SYTYCD, and on the show last week it was some completely new pair.
We were idly speculating that it might be because Pasha and Anya are Russian-Americans, and they may have actually wanted Russian-Russians to be performing (national pride and all that).
The Australian group routines with the floor-flopping look like they have been pure torture on the dancers, on closeups you can see the bruises covering their legs/arms. If I were a dancer on that team, I’d mutiny and keelhaul the choreographer.
“Let me get this right…so after the seventh repetition of diving and throwing myself at the floor, you feel your artistic vision is best realized by my repeating the same damn move for an eighth time? Extend the plank, men!”
I think SYTYCD has spoiled me. Almost all of that looked so sophmoric in comparison. I was yelling at the TV during the couples’ rounds; this one didn’t have any arm extension, that one didn’t keep their backs straight, the choreography wasn’t tight, that sort of thing. And I think if you put those dances on the SYTYCD auditions, they’d never make it to the actual show. :mad: I mean, I could make a couple of decent observations about a few points, but it’s futile. The whole thing was just such a complete and utter waste of time.
The best part to come out of it was the clip of the Chinese judge at whatever theme park. Otherwise, that’ll have to do a hell of a lot of revamping for me to watch again or agree they were “superstars” of dance.