Spotlight On: The Olympics!

Happy August!  And happy Olympics!  I love the Summer Olympics, it's so inspiring to watch athletes from around the world gather to support their country and each other, not to mention the feats of athletic excellence that these individuals are able to conquer!  I feel so proud of not only the US team, but all of the athletes and can only imagine what their individual journeys have been to get to London, the blood, sweat and tears they have shed and sacrificed ... it gets me all verklempt just typing about it!  And when they get up on that podium... it's just magical!

As a dancer you'd be right in guessing that one of my favorite sports to watch is Gymnastics.  Those itty bitty girls pack a punch, and I love it just as much for its similarities to dance as for its differences.  In my younger and more idealistic days I remember feeling upset that Dance wasn't an Olympic sport; dancers work just as hard as athletes to develop the muscular prowess required to perform our art.  Now I feel that those two words - perform and art provide the rub that separates dance from being an Olympic sport.  While dancers are indeed athletes, and dance a very demanding physical sport, it is also a performing art; an ideal that always changes and is somewhat intangible.  That intangibility usually results from defying the usual terms of the pedestrian.  Gravity, for example.  The Romantic ballets and ballerinas were all about portraying a lightness of being, of floating and fluidly moving through space; this is how and why pointe shoes were invented.  That fluidity is part of what makes dancing look so "easy", when in fact that ease is a practiced quality, only found after years and years to the devotion to the technique.  And even after that, the pursuit of making dance look effortless is a continuous one.  Dancers spend their whole careers trying to figure it out.

In the Olympics, athletes are encouraged to show the effort, and the audience wants to see the push, the drive, and the struggle to get to the top.  I'll admit, it is compelling to see the ferocious physical push that athletes exert in their effort to get the gold, but in dance that sign of effort and any sign of "trying" is forbidden.  This is yet another element that separates dance from being a sport.  In sport the struggle of the effort is welcome and applauded, in dance it's disappointing.

Also, as performers, dancers are asked to tell a story, to dive not only physically, but emotionally into a concept, and this I think, is a huge difference between dance and the athletics we find at the Olympics.

I ran across this great article on Slate and wanted to share it as an extension of my thoughts.  

"Coaches and gymnasts, however, don’t treat dance elements as opportunities to connect with the music and audience. They regard them same way they do the tumbling skills—as a way to rack up tenths. Just as gymnasts cram the hardest flips into their 90-second floor routines, they also try to do the most difficult dance elements, regardless of whether or not they fit the music or the mood. Also, many of these “dance” skills exceed the gymnasts’ ability to perform them with anything resembling ease and grace."

-Dvora Meyers, Slate.com

This article makes great points, and I agree that the element of Grace is missing in the Gymnastics floor routines.  Maybe this is due to the newer scoring elements and requirements, but be that as it may, it would be so refreshing to see a floor routine actually performed with some commitment to Grace, rather than for the sole purpose of a high score.  But then again, that's the performing artist in me, not the athlete. : )  

I wanted to post this video that I think shows a really interesting progression of "performing" in Gymnastics.  It really is compelling to look back to the Gymnastics of the 50's and see how much more fluid and graceful the movements of the athletes are.  I definitely don't think that means that the Gymnasts of today are less athletic than Gymnasts of yore, but rather that the audience/judges priorities and idea of what is valuable has changed.

What are your thoughts?  I would love to hear what you think on this issue, or any other thoughts on the Olympics, Dance as a sport, etc.  E-mail me here! We still have many wonderful days of Olympics ahead of us, so I'm sure I'll be posting more!  Go Team USA!