The basics:
Dance: For Your Entertainment
Choreographer: Gordon Elliott
Music: “For Your Entertainment” by Adam Lambert
Description: 64 count, 4 wall intermediate line dance with 1 restart
The review:
The story goes that Gordon wrote this dance for a competition, where the aim was for competitors to set the dance to music and use it for the routine. The winning team, including Adrian Lefebour and Jessica Lamb, found a song that I feel is a great fit for the dance.
Adam Lambert’s song is fast-paced and energetic, with a restart that is surprisingly easy to miss if you don’t pay attention. Gordon’s dance is fast-paced, with a restart that is surprisingly easy to miss …
The dance involves a lot of movement – both on the spot, like the opening kicks, and travelling, like counts 17-28. With the level of energy in the music, I would be disappointed if the dance didn’t have lots of movement, so this is definitely a good choice. While a lot of the steps are standard line dance fare, the kicks in counts 1-4 and the heel raise/drop in counts 29-30 add variety and also provide opportunities for styling, as do other parts like the hips in counts 15-16 and the cross, hold & cross in counts 51-53.
Most of the distance the dance travels is in a single direction for each wall, with the shuffles and full turn of counts 17-26 go towards the back and the roll, shuffle and weave of counts 41-48 travel back to the front. There is a slight issue here if the dance is performed on a small dance floor, since dancers are likely to run into one wall or the other a lot.
In counts 49-60, Gordon takes a sequence of steps almost identical to another recent dance of his, “Give Me Your Love”. Gordon has done this kind of “self-plagiarism” before, and it’s not too different to the way choreographers will borrow interesting steps from other dances – and given the number of “standard” steps, if you chop almost any dance up finely enough you could claim that each step came from another dance. However, it’s rare to see more than a few counts at a time borrowed, so I do wonder whether Gordon could have modified the sequence a little to reduce the similarity (not to mention, the 8 counts immediately preceding are similar to “Africa”, also by Gordon, which serves to highlight the issue). Taken on their own, the steps are good steps, but the level of similarity with the other dances doesn’t gel with the originality elsewhere in “For Your Entertainment”, and in the rest of Gordon’s repertoire.
The last four counts of the dance are different from “Give Me Your Love”, being just a pivot and side rock where the other dance includes a full turn and an & count. I can understand including these slower counts as a break in between two of the most energetic parts of the dance (particularly the start), but I would have liked to see something a little more interesting to match the rest of the dance.
Despite my issues with some of the steps, this is a really fun dance if you’ve got the energy to pull it off. I will echo Gordon in saying well done to Adrian and Jessica and their group, and extend that to Gordon for writing the dance in the first place.
Chris' Line Dance Reviews 