Monday, May 18, 2015

Maybe that was the peak show of Dancing with the Stars this season

I have been having trouble keeping up with the dancing on TV.
Last week's DWTS featured 4 good dancers, and the judges got involved much more than usual.
Not just tips, but choreography from Carrie-Ann, Len, Julianne and Bruno.
Each was recused from judging but it didn't matter. They all got perfect scores. Sometimes the judges don't want to find fault. They don't have to.
Tom revealed that all four had been the top scorer one week or another, including our wounded warrior, Noah Galloway, a beautiful, brave young man missing both an arm and a leg who consistently garners huge audience support. His partner, Sharna Burgess, is Australian and new to the finals.
I like the way Rumer Willis and Valentin Smirkovsky embrace the ethos of the traditional dance steps and mood. When they given the "Shake Your Bootie" song, he choreographed hip shaking as required, but agreed with Len that that was not to his taste.  He is also much more modest than his brother, the overly masculine Maksim.
The handsome young Mormon Riker Lynch is the third finalist, dancing with the contemporary dancer, Alison Holker. She mentioned his objections to the oversexualization that sometimes shows up in the show, demanding a new song when he found the one picked for them offensive.
Eliminated was the Olympic gold gymnast Nastia (Anastasia) Luikin, dancing with Derek Hough, who was phoning in his choreography for a while, having accepted a job at Radio City Music Hall in NYC. She danced with Sasha Farber, troupe member, after Derek injured his ankle.
Anyway, tonight is the finals. The finals are followed by a finale tomorrow, not mentioned on Wikipedia where charts of scores dominate the entry. A better source of information was Road to the Finals, that aired Saturday, a mish mash of old footage that I would have totally missed except that my DVR noticed.
I would rather watch again the Ballroom Challenge show on PBS. The American Rhythm sequence was the best in my opinion, and perhaps the judges as well, since the young Haitian Emmanuel Pierre-Antoine won with his Russian partner Liana Churilova.

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