So you think you wanna dance?

I am no aficionado of dance. By a long stretch. Or by any stretch. I don’t really know what krumping is and though (I think) I know what a pirouette looks like, I have no idea what an arabesque is.

I possibly offended my sister-in-law and niece years ago when I finally admitted that I didn’t enjoy accompanying them to classical ballets. For me the night was akin to a slow-moving book or movie – where I just wanted those on stage to get on with it. I admit to a frustration with plodding (though beautiful) prose. Ballet presented me with the same problem. Though I could guess at the vague degree of difficulty, it seemed a monotonous and a long-winded way of getting to the point.

Having said that, I suspect a night of endless hip hop or contemporary dance would be as tedious to me. Though I accompany my niece to some of her eisteddfods (and I can happily watch my niece dance until the cows come home) where a myriad of styles are often show, my favourite shows are the end-of-year concerts where there is more variety.

The art of dance itself has garnered more attention and support recently with the advent of TV shows, Dancing with the Stars (which I don’t watch) and So You Think You Can Dance (which I do watch). Note here I refrained from adding Dance Your Ass Off, as I don’t think it lasted long enough on our screens to count as having any impact on its 17 nation-wide viewers!

SYTYCD restarts on our TV screens tonight which I discovered yesterday as I watched an old MC Hammer film clip and marveled at the ability of the African-American chicks (in the video) to shake their booties. This (of course) led to some sort of pondering on genetics and nurture versus nature (I obviously have WAY too much time on my hands!!).

There is no question, for example, that some cultures include music and dance as part of their everyday lives, and not solely for the purpose of eventually ‘performing’ for an audience as many of we Aussies do.

In the mid 1990s I went to work in Mozambique (in south-eastern Africa) as a volunteer with a women’s non-government organization. I recall walking to the shops in my first or second week in the country and being enchanted as I was passed by a convoy of trucks carrying groups of men and women all singing and dancing. They were in the throes of a wedding – always a huge (and loud) celebration in Mozambique. I wanted to ring home and share my excitement at what I had been privy to.

I worked in the head office in Maputo but about a week into my time there, my counterpart and I traveled to the outskirts of town to visit one of the groups we supported. We were greeted by the group at Boane with song and dance. I was delighted. It really was the stereotypical Africa that you saw on television. And, of course I was also eventually dragged up to join the women (after being draped in a capulana – piece of fabric / sarong).

As my time in Mozambique wore on I became more accustomed to the role that singing and dancing played in their culture and lives. Some of the issues we promoted (family planning, safe sex etc) were translated into songs. I sat in a church where a priest-of-sorts and his hen (or perhaps it was a rooster? I couldn’t focus as I was worried it was to be a sacrifice* and wasn’t sure how NOT to react) preached to the masses before one of our Activistas (facilitators) presented a session on AIDs – complete with demonstrating how to put a condom on a fake penis – before we broke into song and dance.

In a place called Xai Xai, I remember some young boys getting up to join the dancing women. And it took me a while to realise that they weren’t taking the piss out of their elders for doing something that they found ‘uncool’. They just wanted to join in.

Of course as time went on, I became more inured to what-once-thrilled me (or horrified-me in the case of many Mozambicans with missing limbs as a result of land mines and homeless children sleeping on the footpaths in rags). I have to admit to occasionally getting frustrated on our visits across the countryside. I wanted to see other aspects of our work in action. Did, I wonder, the singing and dancing ensue when I wasn’t there, or was it all for my benefit? Something in between I suspect. But there was no question about the fact that music and dance brought such joy to these people facing difficulties once unimaginable to me. Something I should remind myself of (as I settle down tonight to watch SYTYCD) now that 15 years have passed since I lived amidst such passion and was fortunate enough to share in it for a while.

*Note. The hen / rooster made it safely through the service though it did run amok at one point. We (the official party) were however served a meal of chicken and rice after the service, so unless there was something special about it, I was not really sure how long the hen/rooster would last in the overall scheme of things!

Coincidentally...

I finally saw the much-lauded Avatar last weekend. I was blown-away by how far technology has come since I suffered through queasiness and blue and red tinted lens’ for Jaws 3D in 1983.

I have been entertained by the media reports comparing Avatar’s plot to that of Pocahontas as well as the web postings which do a ‘Find / Replace’ from an excerpt of Pocahontas - replacing John Smith with Jake Sully. Though patting him on the back for his ingenuity, bloggers everywhere are describing Avatar as Pocahontas in Space and wondering if James Cameron merely ‘lifted’ the plot (based on real events anyway!) and added some colour and special effects.

I recently touched on this idea of ‘everything old is new again’ in a blog I wrote about sampling or remixing old songs into new ones, which gave me a chance to revisit with old faves.

But this is different. We see our share of remakes. Some good – Ocean’s Eleven and The Ring come to mind. And some not-so-good – think Psycho and Planet of the Apes. But what I wonder, in a world of remakes and trashy reality television about the world’s worst car-crashes is, are we lazy and purposely stealing ideas or have we just run out of new ones?

I am currently watching two separate television shows, both of which initially had me indignant about the fact that they had seemingly pilfered their storyline from feature films. I couldn’t believe the audacity and wondered why I hadn’t read about copyright breaches. But it appears that all is not as it seems….

My first exhibit is the TV show, The Sopranos, which I am watching half-a-dozen years after the rest of the world. The show has never really appealed to me, but I was in need of something to keep me entertained during the summer off-season here – other than tennis or cricket – so figured 6 seasons of approximately 13 episodes a season would give me 70 hours (give or take) of TV viewing to stave off the boredom.

I vaguely knew what the show was about (mobsters), but it wasn’t until I watched the first season that I realized how closely it resembled the movie, Analyze This. Both centre around a mob boss seeking assistance from a psychiatrist and the consequences (good and bad) of this action. (Of course latter seasons of The Sopranos focus less on this angle, but it plays a pivotal role in the first season.)

I was shocked at the blatant ‘rip-off’ unless of course the show was meant to be a spin off of the movie. It wasn’t. Meant to be a spin off that is. And, more interestingly, it was not a rip-off. Though the series appeared on TV screens in 1999 – the same year the movie was realized - the TV show pilot was actually filmed in 1997. So, just coincidence apparently. Two separate individuals had the same idea. At around the same time.

Then there is a current summer season offering on our TV screens, which I find myself watching though it is a tad trite and obvious. Accidentally on Purpose sees an older career woman become (accidentally – as if that can happen in this day and age?!) pregnant to a 20-something guy who lives with his always-stoned buddy. Sound familiar? If you saw the movie Knocked Up in which Katherine Heigl found herself in a similar state thanks to a drunken one night stand with Seth Rogen, then the plot is WAY too familiar. And yet, wait for it... Apparently the TV show has not pilfered the idea from the movie. Bizarrely the TV show is actually based on a memoir (of the same name).

Thanks to Jenna Elfman and the dry accented wit of Ugly Betty’s Ashley Jensen the show is watchable. Even if full of clichés.

And, speaking of Ugly Betty, though seemingly a product of the success of the feature film, The Devil Wears Prada, the concept was in fact developed in Colombia as Yo soy Betty, la fea (I am Betty, the ugly) in 1999. Again – apparently just a similar idea manifesting itself in the written word and celluloid in different countries. Perhaps that explains the spate of vampire movies, TV shows and novels raining down upon us?

So, it seems, we are not stealing ideas from others. Nor are we lazy. But, have we run out of new ideas? Are there, I wonder, a finite number of ideas floating about in the ether, and have we plucked them all out?

Hopefully not. Occasionally, amid the sea of formulaic offerings about cops, lawyers and doctors, there are glimpses of creative brilliance. Current fodder such as the serial-killing Dexter, raunchy 30 Rock and Entourage and polygamist world of Big Love offer a glimmer of originality amidst the Battlestar Gallactica and Stargate remakes and lazy low-cost reality television shows.

I am (admittedly) a fan of the quirky, such as Joss Whedon and Bryan Fuller and their shows: Firefly, Buffy, Pushing Daisies and Dead Like Me to name a few. However, many of these shows which have piqued my interest did not garner sufficient interest to fend off axe-weilding TV Execs, which makes me all-the-more passionate about supporting new and unusual offerings.

So, as I settle down to Season 4 of The Sopranos and await new seasons of Dexter and Entourage I will continue to hold out some hope for what the year ahead may have to offer.