Philosophic intellectualism examines dance

Dance Dance Revelation: On 'So You Think You Can Dance' by Sarah Blackwood

A strange concoction of high art, hazy humanitarianism, and athletic genius

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In the late nineteenth century, William James developed a theory that proposed emotion as secondary to, or resulting from, the physiological. That is, we don’t fear a bear and then run away from it; we run away from the bear and then, because we are running, experience fear.
In “How Tracy Austin Broke My Heart,” an essay about corporeal genius, David Foster Wallace wondered whether “those who receive and act out the gift of athletic genius must, perforce, be blind and dumb about it […] not because blindness and dumbness are the price of the gift, but because they are its essence.” Both theories critique the impoverished nature of the sort of knowledge work that values insight and explanation over manifestation. So You Think You Can Dance helps frame the problem another way: what if we revamp our assumptions about where genius resides? And how should we understand the bodily genius that the show advocates in the context of the show’s relentlessly popularizing approach?
In its melodrama and athleticism, the spectacle and sentiment on display in So You Think You Can Dance represents a generation that seems completely at ease with its non-relation to the past. Rather than serving up a history of dance, the show gives us bodies at work writing a history of the present. That these bodies belong to relatively inarticulate young people is all the better. They are asked to express and grow as individuals and artists; to advocate for the continuance of an art form that has an increasingly marginal presence in our culture. They do this work, but only by making all the right moves. This is more difficult than it sounds. When was the last time your body truly shaped you?
The body, inarticulate, at work, and joyful in its inarticulate work.