It's not you, Maks

Here is Maks and Meryl's tango from Dancing with the Stars, Season 18, Episode 6.

Meryl's pretty fucking disappointed she got all those nines for
her "samba" last week. She's Meryl Davis. She's entitled to tens
for her bullshit. She's not disappointed in her performance
or the choreo. Just - doesn't understand it. What's with this nines
crap? Meryl Davis gets tens. She went from eights to feeling
entitled to tens in just over a month.

A little refresher. This shoulda been tens.



They proceed to rehearse, and

Maks doesn't understand why she's so fucking timid
(i.e., "small" I believe, and self protective as a mover), why
she's got a memory like a sieve, and why she can't pick up some
basic simple steps or get the rudimentary timing.
Oh Maks. She's Meryl Davis.

Meryl doesn't need to learn new steps.

She's got this:

Note that in the Argentine Tango part of the gif, Meryl does her kick/swing back while Val does a sharp bent knee AT tango inside kick. It's meant to be a mirror move, and sort of tricks the eye that it is, but she's not doing the AT move (haven't reviewed the proper names) that's he's doing.

Don't want to leave anybody in suspense about this week:

Let's lift the veils, and look at how balletic:

There she is.

And she's got this:

 So Meryl tells Maks:

"It's not me. It's you."

Not like a ballerina.

This is not like a ballerina

I don't see many ballerinas with the torso tight, chest closed, hips tight and closed, shoulders nearly hunched, and chin down facing the floor or ice. This is almost freakish.

See the difference?

See the difference?

Forget the toes. And the skating. Look at the torso, the shoulders, the chest, the neck (not snapped back, btw), the pelvis and the hips. Everything's stretched, lifted, open.

See the difference directly below? Straight up and down. The body isn't connected, there's nothing running "through" the body. And look at that dropped elbow.

See the difference?

Let's look back at the top again.

This is not good. It's bad. I imagine Davis White fans have simply been in the habit of getting those two concepts mixed up for a long time.

I'm having issues embedding Meryl and Charlie's dances from last night, so I'll have to troubleshoot that later.

ETA - okay, here we go:



I haven't broken thse down yet, but I bet Charlie wouldn't have dropped the cane if he engaged his upper body fully when he moves. Charlie trends to "quick" but small. He doesn't really articulate his body unless it's where it's been particularly broken down for him and emphasized by his instructor, and then defaults back to small. He might have caught the cane before it flew away if he didn't have that habit. He needs to keep his chest and shoulders open.

But note that at the end, Sharna is able to rotate without Charlie hunkering down and girdling her with his arm, pasting her to his trunk, and pushing her legs straight.

I do think his partner is a class act, that they connect well, and it helps him phrase, cue off her, and lose himself more in the performance. He shouldn't, IMO, start getting fast-but-unfinished when he starts getting into the performance, but that happened less here than in the jive.

And as for Meryl, I thought this was her best performance in terms of moving with some naturalness and relaxation added into her jackhammer movement style, but then again, there wasn't exactly a ton of movement, period. There were glimpses of samba in tiny segments. It was like DW skating programs (and like Maks' choreography, which means he and Meryl are a match made in heaven) - show a minimal amount of the actual dance - dance, hell, minimize steps, period, and vamp with the upper body. Execute super complicated open hold moves like moving side by side across the floor or ice in a stright line facing the same direction and then switch from right to left in an arm's length hand hold. That blew up the scoreboard in Schez, if memory serves.


Gifs after the jump.

I'm going to put them up and comment more later but I think most of the "samba" speaks for itself. If anybody can explain some of the WTF, feel free.

You know what I just now noticed, and realize happened in the AT too - she tries to or actually does hop or jump in direction changes even on the floor. Look at the elementary direction changes in this "samba".  Little hops, up-jerks and jumps all over the place (and I don't mean the samba "bounce", but when she changes direction).

Pirouettes are my favorite part of samba.

I can't remember what part of samba this is but Meryl is killing it.

Maks is catching on.

Got a better copy of this. As I just watched it, I had to take back the idea of not saying anything until tomorrow. My main question isn't just where did the Foxtrot happen, but where did the dancing happen?


Meryl actually walked this dance. I could see if it were contemporary, where you sort of walk around lyrically in between emoting and lifts, but this is Foxtrot. She was striding through the parts where she wasn't death dropping and kicking. I get when you've got somebody who's not really a dancer - and she's not - you break it up so they don't have to sustain a through line. I get it. But the part where we're to believe she was actually doing the assigned dance, she was walking and striding. No rise and fall. That's what I'm going to gif tomorrow.

Look at Meryl foxtrot.
One wonders what went on in training, and at what point
Maks realized he couldn't teach her to actually dance.
Break out the bag of schtick (He had Kirstie Alley
on the floor in one of their dances too. Of course, she
was 60.)

And this:

8 straight seconds standing dead still. I recounted. 14 seconds standing in one spot on the floor. 7 seconds not even changing position, just lip hovering. I bet even Marina would be hard-pressed to beat that. You go, Maks.



This guy's older than Meryl - it's John O'Hurley from Season 1, doing a foxtrot. I don't think he has a gold medal at home, but he's not taking a load off in the middle of his routine. I'm putting it here so the rise and fall can be observed.

She's tight with the music all right

I won't be able to gif this until tomorrow, so for now:


Gee, they thought Meryl lost timing a couple of times.

You don't say.

Imagine being an Olympic-gold medal possessing ice dancer on DWTs, getting a dance that goes right to your specialty, which is being tossed, flipped and flung like a sack of laundry while warp-speed flinging out your legs below the knee and your arms from the shoulders out, and the judges can only cough up one extra point from your debut. Meryl is really bad. How can a solid, built-like-a-fireplug, slam-into position, under five feet tall, teen gymnast be a better dancer than a gold-medal draped ice dancer? Shawn Johnson was Yulia Zagoruychenko compared to Meryl. Meryl is terrible!

No rhythm at all, no musicality. Her shoulders, head, back and hips are rigid. She's had two super fast, athletic dances to help her get her feet wet before the slower, dramatic, more controlled, more graceful stuff starts, and she can't pull them off.

She's doing nothing differently in terms of dancing than she did on ice, where judges apparently thought she was so "tight" with that music they wish they had +10's - referencing that section of the guidelines that deals with "tightness" that I can't seem to find anywhere.

This performance has nothing to do with the difficulty of transferring from ice to the floor. She wasn't on the damn floor half the time. This is - she can't dance.

I think the judges are being kind, and were kind last week. They're giving her points for the energy and the fitness. For now they're focusing on her total lack of musicality and her imprecision. Dear God wait til they get to her alignment and her rigidity. Baby steps. Don't want to pile on.

I don't know if I've ever seen an ice dancer with such a stiff, brittle back, who is all knees down, and then arms, no torso, no hips, can't phrase, and has no sense of time. I don't think even Maria Butyrskaya was this tight.



Butyrskaya had better edges too.

Meryl "dances" like one of the exercise obsessives in some high intensity, high impact jazzercise or aerobics class - you could break your face on her muscles, and your jaw drops at the zero body fat, but she has no rhythm whatsoever and walks funny. Little spastic scurrying feet, oblivious to any timing but frantic, is not dancing.

And why not watch Kristy Yamguchi on her first DWTs episode (not a dancer, a singles skater. And a pairs girl), years removed from her competitive prime, and in her thirties:



Okay, waiting for Charlie. And gifs tomorrow.