NOTE:
We've been watching old reruns of the Dick Cavett show on cable TV. Recently we saw a full hour interview of Fred Astaire, where he talked about how many hours he practiced to get each dance routine perfected for the cameras. Cavett showed a video of the excellent Astaire Puttin' On The Ritz dance from Blue Skies. It may have been Astaire's best performance. So good we saved in on our DVR to view again and again.
"As I watched old Fred Astaire movies, I was struck by the sheer perfection of his movements and his flawless syncopation. I had the conscious thought that America would be so much better off if Fred Astaire's work ethic and search for perfection were applied to our own culture.
One Fred Astaire dance, in particular, stands out as the quintessence of hard work and purity of effort: "Puttin' on the Ritz." Astaire, in his iconic top hat and tails, takes the music and reshapes it to his dance. He doesn't merely dance to the music; the music dances to him.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GKPMk5_gStk&feature=youtu.be
According to John Mueller, an American political scholar and expert on the dance, the wow factor in "Puttin' on the Ritz" is the use of delayed rhythmic resolution: a staggering, off-balance passage, emphasized by the unorthodox stresses in the lyric, suddenly resolves satisfyingly on a held note, followed by the forceful assertion of the title phrase.
Mueller's description is a long way of saying that what Astaire did in this particular number was impossible in anyone else's hands. Or feet. Astaire created from whole cloth a way of dancing that forevermore would have his elegance stamped on it.
Reading his autobiography is revealing. While not a great literary work, it wasn't meant to be. It was simply and honestly his childhood vaudeville story with his sister in a stage act that traced from when they were small children to when he struck out on his own.
He later went on to Hollywood to dance with the most beautiful, talented actresses of those days. Ginger Rogers was not his only dance partner. There were other beauties like Rita Hayworth, Eleanor Powell, Leslie Caron, and Cyd Charisse with her sultry litheness. Opinions differ as to who was his best partner. (Hint: Ginger.)
Astaire directed the people doing the filming of his dances never to shoot anything but full-body shots because it interfered with the flow of the dance. He was right. Astaire also curled his middle fingers while dancing because he felt they were too long.
Such attention to detail, in addition to his God-given gift, made him the best dancer of any time in our history. There has never been another Fred Astaire. While Gene Kelly and Donald O'Connor, two wonderful dancers of the same period, were excellent, they were different.
Dance-wise, I can think of no 21st-century dancers of Astaire's genre and accomplishment, except perhaps Derek Hough, who has the control and talent to come close in movement if not in style. Even Mikhail Baryshnikov said he looked to Fred Astaire for inspiration. He said, "No dancer can watch Fred Astaire and not know that we all should have been in another business."
If you view our culture across all lines of endeavor, you may notice that people are succeeding and rising to the top of professions and businesses and entertainment with little going for them except a coarseness that demands you pay attention.
The Fred Astaire ethic of working a problem from every angle, a hundred times if necessary, in order to make it the very best it can be, is gone. In its place are expediency, greed, sloth, lust for power, and a total lack of reasonable solutions.
Would that we had some Fred Astaires in our government and in our agencies. Perhaps something would actually get done that helps Americans rather than hurts them. And it would be far more appealing to watch.
The lessons of Fred Astaire loom large. A return to a strong work ethic and the courage to work a problem to an effective and salutary solution is in order. I look forward to the day when we wrest control of our country from the no-talents, the non-thinkers, the inept strategists, and give them to people who have actual solutions instead of all the tap-dancing we are seeing now."
