UGA’s Best of the Worst Dance Crew

Winners D-Coy celebrate. Photo by Blane Marable.

By Ashley Bene

Hosted by the Committee for Black Cultural Programming, the UGA’s Best Dance Crew competition had its inaugural event on March 22, 2011. Tickets were free for students, and in hindsight, even the free entry couldn’t make up for the wasted hour of my life.

Five UGA dance groups - Georgia Dance Team, D-Coy, Red Hotz, Mahogany, and Sweet Dreams - competed. Each team performed twice: one regular number and one number in which they had to complete a challenge such as dancing in slow-mo. Of course, none of this was explained to the audience before the competition began, and I found myself asking people around me why some groups had to do a “challenge” while others had regular numbers. It was not until the first repeat group of the evening that the course of the competition was clear.

The only group that stood out was the second group, called D-Coy. They are comprised of males and females and specialize in hip-hop dancing. Their performances were clean and energetic (one of the judges said, “too energetic”).

They stayed in sync with each other, while also incorporating their own personalities into the dance moves with facial expressions and body language. When they did transitional moves to change formations during their numbers, they kept the transitions short, careful not to waste precious dance time. They came into the competition as a crowd favorite, and their second routine got the only standing ovation of the evening.

The other four groups were all-female and despite each group claiming to have experience with a number of different types of dance (jazz, tap, lyrical, hip-hop, contemporary, ballet, etc), they relied on sexiness to appeal to the crowd.

The groups are interchangeable in my memory as I remember the competition. The one who stands out most was Georgia Dance Team, which is in its first year at UGA, because they were the least polished performers. Two of their dancers almost collided, and many had rubbery knees and legs as they attempted spins. They looked at their feet a lot, and one girl looked so bored I was expecting her to yawn in the middle of the number.

The other three groups had better energy and covered any mistakes they made more smoothly, but their routines were about shaking their hips around and hair-tossing rather than any challenging dance moves.

Now, I don’t expect college students to get on stage and perform straight ballet or tap pieces to hip-hop/pop songs, but they can incorporate more of the principles of these dance forms into it to stay true to the art form. There’s nothing impressive about dancing like you’re in a night club. Most of the girls I know do that every weekend with no prior dance experience. Perhaps the worst moves these groups made was over using poses.

One group did sexy poses for the last thirty seconds of a song, while the other groups used poses as transitional parts of routines while some of the performers moved around the stage, posing as they walked. There is nothing impressive or creative about posing. If you want to pose, model; aside from the start and end of a dance, there is very little room to waste music on poses.

As if a dance competition full of bad dancers wasn’t enough, the judges were pretty clueless as well. The four judges included the Myers Hall Area Coordinator, Adam Scarbaro; two basketball players, Chris Barnes and Trey Tompkins; and, the only judge with dance background, a female UGA student, Shirleyse Costen.

After each number, the judges got to critique the dancers, which ruined any chance of the competition or the judges’ abilities being taken seriously. Scarbaro told nearly every group, “good job,” which garnered laughter from the audience after the first three performances. Costen made helpful observations a few times, but made a snotty comment when she told D-Coy she “has stepped before and wasn’t impressed” with their challenge to include step moves, even though it was a clean, energetic dance. Barnes and Tompkins were oblivious to the dancing and spent the evening ogling every scantily-clad female on the stage. After a particularly sexy number by Sweet Dreams, Barnes said, “I’m gonna have sweet dreams tonight!”

Lucky for the judges picking a winner wasn’t rocket science, as D-Coy was easily the best group there and had the most audience support. Mahogany earned second place over Sweet Dreams, who came in third. Really though, winning UGA’s Best Dance Crew is meaningless, as nobody in the competition was that impressive.

Classic satire shows its True Colors

By Marlyncia Pierce

Miss Pat, a perky flight attendant, warns to “fasten your shackles” as Kenny Leon’s True Colors Theatre brings the 1986 classic satire “The Colored Museum.” While Miss Pat (Amber Iman) lays down the rules for the flight — no drums, no rebellion — we expect our ride to be turbulent with laughter all the while stricken with heavy truths. The play is set up like a museum with 11 exhibits, all taking jabs at stereotypes surrounding African Americans. Even 25 years later, George C. Wolfe’s timeless play falls in place as True Colors handles the colorful, sophisticated context with special care.

As the director for her third True Color’s performance, Jasmine Guy extends the talent of six actors to unravel the absurd yet hysterical exhibition. She first got her feet wet in the director’s pool with “For Colored Girls,” and later with “I Dream: The Life of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.” Guy spruces up Wolfe’s script with insertions of present-day motifs, including pokes at the current dance craves like “The Dougie” and “The Stanky Leg.” Oddly, the 90-minute exhibition plays through without an intermission, leaving little room to digest the messages in their entirety. In real life, no one breezes through a museum without a small second (or in this case, a 15 minute intermission) to reflect and ponder on the message. Another fault were the kinks in the sound system, which were a bit distracting. But the cast’s resilience over the technicalities can’t go unrecognized.

The vignette “Soldier with a Secret,” performed by Ali Aman Carter speaks volumes on the troubled soldiers coming home after war. The monologue is followed by a lighthearted, but toilsome “The Last-Mama-on-the-Couch Play,” which pokes fun at theater classics, “Raisin in the Sun” and “For Colored Girls,” a choreopoem that Guy also directed for True Colors’ last year. Here, Enoch King stands out as “the angry black man,” whose brows are low from oppression from “the man.” His eloquent touch in other exhibits: the tormented, flamboyant homosexual and the conformed, token black guy are breathtakingly delightful.

Self-identity and objectification shows through in “The Hairpiece” as kinky coiled Janine (Yakini Horn) and straight pressed LaWonda (Danielle Deadwyler) hash it out. “It don’t matter the grade, as long as the point gets made,” LaWonda shouts as The Woman (Amber Iman) decides which wig to flaunt on a date to break up with her boyfriend. Horn and Deadwyler are exquisite in their comedic tag-team work over the touchy subject of the black woman’s hair.

Until April 17, “The Colored Museum” will raise questions and eyebrows while the subjects juggle the line between offensive and gratification. The crowd responded with side-crunching laughs and heavy moans for the nerve-striking lines. The Porter Sandford III Performing Arts Center is located on the outskirts of Atlanta in Decatur. As Guy addressed her in greeting to the audience, "If it's good, [the people] will come." For what it's worth (without an intermission and sound problems) — it is good.

Book Review: Heresy

By: Carrie Donovan

The front of the novel Heresy, by author J.S. Parris, states that the book is a ‘historical thriller.’

Perhaps "historically-based, occasionally kind of intriguing work of fiction" was too long to fit on the cover.

The novel is based on the story of Giordano Bruno, a 16th century Italian monk, mathematician, astronomer and philosopher whose insistence that the Earth orbited the sun and that the universe extended infinitely into space proved a bit too radical for his Catholic contemporaries.

It would be hard to imagine a more interesting or tumultuous setting than post-Reformation England, nor a more fascinating character than the rebellious Bruno. Perhaps then, it is Parris’ rigid structure alone that manages to transform her lovably free-spirited protagonist into the pawn of a formulaic plot that reminds the reader of a Dan Brown concept gone stale.

We are first introduced to the main character, affectionately known as Bruno, when he is caught in the monastery's latrine reading Erasmus' banned "Commentaries,” a crime punishable by death. After his escape to nowhere in particular, save wherever the Inquisition will not be, Bruno finds himself in London, where he receives a mission from Queen Elizabeth’s spymaster, Francis Walsingham, to root out Oxford University Catholics who may be plotting to overthrow the Protestant queen.

But apparently Bruno is also on a mission independent of the crown. He is aiming to uncover the whereabouts of a missing manuscript that purportedly contains the lost wisdom of the Egyptians, and a “secret that could destroy the authority of the Christian church.” Alas, both his official and unofficial missions are driven off course by a series of dramatic killings on the Oxford campus, which further complicates the Protestant-Catholic divide that threatens to destroy both the college and the kingdom as a whole.

Parris wastes no time in suggesting that things are not always as they seem. Not suggesting, so much as having various cryptic characters lay it out in painfully obvious terms. “No man in Oxford is as he seems, Doctor Bruno,” says the spiky and gnomic man in the corner.

Perhaps the art of foreshadowing could simply be left to the every-other-paragraph description of the weather, which always seems to be as gray and bleak as Bruno’s hopes of solving the murders before that cryptic-but-eerily-familiar symbol or Latin phrase that the unknown stranger slid under his door in the nighttime translates into that next we-should-have-seen-it-coming murder.

Then again, perhaps it is this predictability and comfortably familiar storytelling style that has propelled the novel from obscurity in the first place. It may not be wholly satisfying, but beneath the layers of exaggerated code-breaking ah-ha moments lies an underlying message that represents what Bruno was all about in the first place; a truth above the politics of religious difference.

Indeed, the bulk of the novel’s underlying message is probably easiest summed up by Bruno’s near death declaration that he only wants “to be left in peace to understand the mysteries of the universe in his own way." To which his adversary mockingly replies, "Ah. Tolerance." Whether it is worth tolerating the previous 430 pages to arrive at the moral fiber of this remarkably lackluster caper is another question entirely.

Wayne Hoffman at UGA

By: Carrie Donovan

Sometimes it’s necessary to judge the proverbial book by its cover – especially if you’re in the mind-reading business.

While mentalist and illusionist Wayne Hoffman failed to satisfy those audience members expecting to see a top-hatted, tail-coated, bunny-wielding magician with an affinity for sawing people in half during his Tate Theater performance on Monday night, he definitely made up for his lack of flair with a trick that no one could have predicted: blatant honesty.

Though some of the hour-long show was dedicated to exploring the more cliché staples of the illusion industry, such as linking three separate rings into a single chain and transforming simple phrases into really bad puns, Hoffman wholly captivated the crowd during a 30-minute segment of seemingly inexplicable and prop-free mental trickery.

He catapulted a paper airplane into the crowd to let fate select his first volunteer, and for the sake of time and possible participant injury randomly called on other eager hand-raisers for the rest of the show. He guessed childhood pet names, home desktop backgrounds and one girl’s phone number with a speed that would imply that he is either a distant relative of J.K. Rowling’s Voldemort or exceptionally upfront about his stalking habits.

During the game of guess and reveal, at which point some members of the audience became overwhelmed with conflicting urges to either stay and marvel at the impossibility of Hoffman’s feats or to bolt out the theater doors before he decided to start unveiling Social Security numbers and ATM codes, the illusionist explained the art behind his magic.

“I just break it down,” Hoffman said. “I’m going to look at the way someone acts, the way they sit, the way they dress.” He outlined the process using an audience member’s memory of his first car, saying that the amount of gel in his hair was a large factor in assuming that he owned a Honda and not a pick-up truck.

According to Hoffman, the simplest way to get inside a stranger’s mind is by taking an initial impression and creating a pool of probability, using supplementary body language and other immediate clues to narrow down his options further.

As mystery propelled the first half of the show, the eventual glimpse into the phenomenal talent required to deduce so much information from seemingly insignificant cues was almost more impressive than the secrecy that thrills the audience in the first place.

And while it may be heartbreaking to discover that you give off a “my first hamster was named after a Spice Girl” vibe, getting a first-hand glimpse into the many intricacies behind the illusion is well worth a bit of embarrassment.

Collection of short stories highlights black youth

By Kelundra Smith

In her debut, short-fiction collection "Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self," Danielle Evans gives voice to black, middle-class, young adults in stories of identity, sex, parent-child relationships and love. She covers a lot of material in these eight stories relating to the formation of racial identity, yet slides the effects of racial identity in so smoothly that they are relatable across color lines.

Sex and its complications are themes in almost all of the stories, especially in “Virgins,” which was previously published in Paris Monthly and "Best American Short Stories 2008." This story is about teenage girls experimenting with sex without the maturity to handle its consequences. Evans addresses these issues again in “Harvest,” this time using white, college girls selling their eggs to pay for tuition or buy designer clothing as its context.

Evans poignantly writes how the build of this resentment starts for “barely middle-class black families where the girls were always called Courtney or Kelli or Lindsay or Brooke, and the family forgoes vacation and savings and stock for a nice house in a nice neighborhood in the hopes that the neighbors will forget they are black.” In both stories sex, and the desire for it, is a dividing point between friends, and men are seen as predators to be loved and feared for their ability to take and protect.

Biracial identity, family and mental health are all subjects explored in perhaps the best story in the collection — “Snakes.”

This story is about a biracial girl named Tara reflecting on the summer she spent with her white cousin Allison and grandmother Lydia in their Florida country club neighborhood. The girls busy themselves by playing in the lake behind their grandmother’s home, until, in a moment of frustration, Grandma Lydia tells Tara that there are snakes in the lake. This seemingly small lie engulfs the entire family, changing their relationships and shaping their futures in unforeseen, pitiful ways. This is also the only story in the collection that does not use college as a pivotal point that characters are striving to, or from which they are recovering.

Evans even infuses the male perspective into these stories in “Someone Ought to Tell Her There’s Nowhere to Go,” about a soldier trying to re-integrate into civilian life after serving in Iraq, and in “The King of a Vast Empire,” about the damage divorce and trauma have caused a dysfunctional brother and sister. These are both good stories, but Evans’ female voice infiltrates the narration of “The King of a Vast Empire” in a way that makes one question the narrator’s sex until it is revealed in the story, and not in a good way.

“Robert E. Lee Is Dead” is a wonderful ending to an overall well-crafted collection of short stories. It is a new take on a classic tale of being from the “wrong side of the tracks,” with its narrator Crystal like a black, more educated Maniac Magee. In this story, white flight and the need to be accepted are set against the football game between Stonewall Jackson and Robert E. Lee high schools. In this environment, black students are trying to thrive in a glorified old South legacy that reaches its pinnacle at the height of black oppression.

This story is especially well-written, because the narrator’s language changes as her identity changes “…I’d slipped through our school’s de facto segregation...” she says about being criticized for being smart and as a result losing social acceptance.

And as screwed up as some of these characters are, it is refreshing to read literature about black people that are educated, middle-class and passionate in spite of themselves. Evans has mastered the art of a good build while also examining the psychology of middle-class, black youth. "Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self" is a book of untold stories, crafted in a way that makes them each worth reading a few times.


Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self.
By Danielle Evans.
Riverhead Books. 232 pages. $25.95

Brutally honest bio recounts post-divorce obstacles

By Kari Quill

If you’re one that seeks thrill from reading someone else’s diary, I highly suggest hijacking Rhoda Janzen’s memoir of going home. ”Mennonite in a Little Black Dress" falls nothing short of a brutally honest account of the most challenging obstacles Janzen has overcome as a recent divorceé. Sure, self-help books, family, friends and faith have helped along the way, but her introspection trumps all. Intrigued by Janzen’s constant e-mails about bunking up with her old-fashioned Mennonite parents at 44 years old, her friends finally urged her to share her hilarious tidbits with the world. You are going to wish you had your very own “Pee Bag” like her when laughing out loud is taken to the next level.

Not only can I taste the braised cabbage in one of her five “shame-based” foods from her childhood lunchbox, but also I cringe at her mother’s “Moses of all farts” in the grocery store that soils the page. Her tone similar to Cathy Lamb’s wit, Janzen’s consistent ability to make the words jump off the page turns this confessional into a conversation with your best friend. Without whining, she explains the grieving process of losing her husband of 15 years to Bob, a man he met on Gay.com.

While she admits her continued bouts with her abusive husband were a result of her idiocy, she doesn’t drown in self-pity or even blame him entirely. Where there is a moment to dwell on the unfortunate hand she was dwelt, she surprises readers with newfound wisdom.

While living at home, she comes to accept her parents’ devoutness to the Mennonite doxy, simultaneously creating her own belief system. Though she recognizes the Bible’s “toxic charm,” she believes: “When you’re young, faith is often a matter of rules. But as you get older, you realize that faith is really a matter of relationship — with God, with the people around you, with the members of your community.” Despite the social rejections of the conservative Mennonites, she highlights the relationships she cherishes within her religious community.

However, one can’t help but first wonder the significance of her interaction with a slightly deaf elderly neighbor, Mrs. Friesen, obsessed with cat books with titles such as "The Cat That Dropped a Bombshell." But, as no good deed goes unpunished, Janzen’s visit leads her to Mrs. Friesen's Mennonite grandson who appreciates her "real nice shape" and generosity just as his grandmother does.

Now heavily immersed in academia at Hope College in Michigan, Janzen presents new logic that prompts a reader of any age to reflect upon one’s character. She presents arguments that make even flaws seem understandable. As she tackles the human condition, she raises the simplest of questions rarely considered by all of society: “And since even the most virtuous among us displays this adiaphorous morality, what if we agreed just to let people be who they are, since we can’t change them anyway?”

While she explains that only patterns of behavior can explain virtue, I realize it is all in your foundation, not necessarily your “genetic gift basket,” but how you add value to it everyday. For some, it’s adding ingredients of your mom’s cooking to your past knowledge and coming up with something all your own.

Instead of meandering through the self-help aisle at the bookstore, I urge you to immerse yourself in conversation with Janzen. An articulate, poignant and refreshing woman, Janzen can sympathize with just about anyone.