Groovaloos

I have been backed up with the posts for a little while now. It's not that the motivation isn't there, but it hasn't been a priority these days. Anyway...I wanted to post on this one because the show was so freakin' awesome and if any of you ever has a chance to catch it, I would be doing the Groovaloos a disservice by not advocating what a great show it is.

I saw it at the Samueli Theater two Thursdays ago. It happened to be the same night that the Lakers blew the huge lead on their home floor, pretty much handing over the series to the Celtics. I caught the first quarter and I was in agony leaving the game, but I'm glad that I didn't catch the rest of the game. I thought it was a little alarming when I didn't come out of the performance and I didn't have more texts celebrating the fact that we had dismantled the Celtics. But I digress...

So Chris obviously has a thing for performance theater. I guess Groovaloos normally play up in Los Angeles, but earlier this month they came out for some engagements down here in Orange County. The Samueli Theater is considered a part of the group of theaters that comprise the OC Performing Arts Center. Going to this show completes them all for me. It's a tiny little theater that's out on the corner of Anton and Avenida of the Arts. I think. I had never even known of its existence because the entrance is facing the opposite direction than the other ones. It seats about 500, which sounds like a good amount, but it's really not. One of my favorite parts about the show was looking at the audience and the diversity of the crowd. We were seated up in an upper area in chairs that look down on the stage. The back two rows in the middle were made up of a bunch of girls in their early teens. They were really loud and while I was bugged by them in the beginning, I couldn't help but fall in love with them when they initiated a body-roll wave that snaked around three rows while they all giggled hysterically. Even adults were participating. It was probably the oddest/funniest thing I have seen in a theater.

The performance is brief, about 90 minutes, and provides a constant barrage of hip-hop/freestyle dancing telling the stories of each dancer within the performance. I guess it's been going on for several years, so some of the original cast has moved on, but the replacements have helped maintain the strength of the performance. In fact, one of the girls that joined the crew was Ashlee from season two of So You Think You Can Dance. Although she wasn't my favorite dancer back then, she definitely was in her element in the show.

Each dancer has his/her own story to tell. Some of the narrative is prerecorded, but my favorite is when the MC does a kind of freestyle narrative. The guy just has the sound and look of cool to him, which feels lame for me to put it that way, but if you've seen the performance then you'd know what I mean by that.

I guess what I enjoyed most about the show was that it takes a genre of dance that's usually seen as anti-a lot of things and combined elements of theater and youthfulness in a way that made a lot of sense. The audience was encouraged to laugh, cry, and yell out about anything that touched them, and you can bet that the body-roll wave girls were getting totally into it.

If you have a chance, I strongly encourage you to check it out, even moreso if you like that style of dance. Or if you like other such hits as You Got Served and Step Up.