Thanks for the link, it's very interesting. I have to say though, poor Hazel Newbury. I know she only did one dance on the show but how gutting to have that stat to your name!

Yes we are saying similar things.

I'd like to have more information about the training. I like Aliona and have been following her time on the show, and from what little I have seen, she looks to me to be good at training.
I like the way Aliona puts her own style in the choreograph, even if it doesn't always work, but her AS last year was one of my favourite routines ever, so I must just be one of those who gets what she was aiming for.

Matt is maybe the one who can say it best what Aliona is like.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CoD8w...eature=related

I LOVED that routine! They kept saying this year that Artem took a risk with the AS and it has never been done before, and I kept thinking last year Aliona choreographed a contemporary based AS, this isn't the first time.

The AS and Matt's Tango were my favourite routines from them. And actually, Matt's tango is one of my favourite routines throughout SCD.

Although Im quite surprised at myself for this, I have a feeling that Harry and Aliona's quickstep might be the first wow dance of this year.

From the training footage on Wednesday and the bits from their interview on ITT last night, I think it could really be something really good.

We have been missing a real WOW performance this year and this could be it...

But just taking a mean average of scores isn't a good way of measuring the standard of teaching. The most obvious thing to me is that pros who completely fail poor partners and get them eliminated week 1 are lauded above those who manage to teach them and raise their standard to mediocre over the course of a series, because they cull their difficult students before they can affect their average. As an example, Vincent lost both Stephanie and Eggwina in week 1, and with the best will in the world neither of them were ever going to get scores above 29. Was he a better teacher for sandbagging Eggwina with that awful desperate foxtrot without any content rather than teaching her to dance and maybe pushing forward on a series of scores in the 20-25 range, damaging his average? I would argue not.

Never mind that overall average scores are most obviously influenced by the quality of celebs you get given to start with - Ian never got a dud in 6 series.

I hope he does because it's only 3 weeks to the final. Aliona says he's mostly in hold so I'm ecstatic! Better late than never.

Now's not really the time to keep hiding weaknesses. They should be working on improving them to make them better dancers. It's supposed to be the cream of the crop....well...show it!

I think Harry will be the only one that can really deliver this weekend.

Excited to see how Saturday goes especially since Aliona has said it will all be in hold

I hope he can bring the quality we saw in the training footage on Saturday and more importantly sustain all through the routine.

What Ian said about the Swing in his dance was simmilar to what Karen said about his Waltz. That it is almost unheard of on Strictly to see celebs doing it because Pros just don't have time to teach it with everything else.
When Aliona was being dragged over the coals by some posters for taking Harry out of hold during the last half of the Waltz. I did suggest the theory on the board that taking into account Karen's comments about Swing and Sway (how its something pros don't normally teach because they have no time) that Aliona may have taken a calculated risk.
ie
Give Harry less choreography to learn in an early ballroom dance so that she could make time to teach him a lot more technique and not just some, knowing that if it paid of and they stayed in the competition, it would a be a skill he had under his belt non of the others would have and he could use it in all his other ballroom dances in the future.
If this is what Aliona did (we will I suppose find out on Saturday) then the girl deserves a round of applause and a pat on the back.


how very dare you???

Aliona may well be an extremely good teacher - or, more specifically, an extremely good teacher for Harry.


I don't really give a monkey's about her personality. I care that she seems to be relatively inexperienced (or, less charitably, just loony) in terms of her choreography.

It's possible she's improving / gaining experience - her statements on ITT seem to hint that way - but there's no denying she has pulled some seriously weird sh1t in her time.

I bow to your knowledge of maths-y things, but how else can the standard be measured?

I mean, at least these are numbers. OK, they are numbers generated by arbitrary and sometimes just weird judges, but they're better than opinion.

And when you have a 6-7 point discrepancy, over 5-6 series, between two pros, that surely has some significance?

Admittedly, the stats can be measured in lots of different ways, but the gap between (for example) Anton and some of the other males still seems quite a significant one.


Mmm, Mica Paris? Still, yes, he did have a good lot - maybe it was because THEY WERE TALL?

How about taking the pro's total score and divide it by the number of scoring dances they would have completed if they'd made it to the final? It at least eliminates their score being magnified because they ditched a donkey early on in any particular series

Edit: There's also the question of whether a 9 or 10 score has been applied consistently throughout the series - which would make any calculation suspect...imo
Last edited by SideshowStu : 25-11-2011 at 17:33

Other complications with average score dabbling are;

Potential 'softening' in judging criteria as years go on
Longer series will lead to higher averages simply because of the time factor and that scores tendentiously increase rather than decrease.
And, on that note, dancers who dance longer in the contest will gain greater averages.
The first two series particularly seem to be shorter and confer generally lower score averages; which would skew against the pros around for those series.. although I don't think most of the low scorers (professionals) lasted long at all.
Some partners are simply better than others; some people you can't do anything with. Take Flavia for example: She's come runner up, but she's also had several... poor dancers. Kristina, too.

Unless there's a solid way of measuring latent ability of celebs, it's hard to factor out all these confounds.
It's probably better to look at the teaching on a case by case ability.

With Anton, I would probably say that his choreo isn't intended to get high scores with his duffers. Compare him and Natalie's efforts this year; Anton did that same bloody lift every dance with Nancy, and it seemed like he was trying to go for the car crash angle. Whereas Natalie tried to hide Audley's lack of ability, although even that could only go so far - it got better scores. How many duffers has Anton had?

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And on Aliona - I think she makes routines the public will like (based on this year) - sometimes there seems to be too much skew on the performance element, but in her credit if she did this last year it clearly worked well enough for her, and is doing so this year.

I guess I'd say that you'd measure quality of teaching by how much the quality of the student's output improved over time, so some sort of stat that measured how the celebs scores grew from their first dance to their last, but I'm not enough of a maths bod to say how you'd measure that. And then obviously you'd still have the problem with the order that dances were done, that they keep on changing genre, and the fact that there's a month or so of "unscored dancing" and training where I'd guess most of the work is done (speaking as someone with a lack of knowledge of dance-y stuff).

It might be worth bearing in mind that for supposedly being the best teachers, none of James, Vincent or Ian have actually won the show. Although that probably says more about the public vote than anything else.


But there are so many dances that tall people are physically incapable of doing!

Dance of the series so far!!!!!!!!!!

Nice one Aliona! Enjoyed tonight's quickstep (although not the best I've seen on Strictly but classic and well executed).

And so it turned out to be! First dance this year I'd say was on a par with previous series' quality.


She's far from the only one though, I can't think of a pro who hasn't choreographed routines I've thought were strange at best, terrible at worst, especially this year where the majority of them have been guilty of a bad routine or two!

That's really what puzzles me - Aliona gets all the hate for 'bad' choreography or being too contemporary, but other pros are just as bad, and what she's doing clearly works, whereas for others it doesn't.

All the pros have been guilty of bad choreorgraphy from time to time, but what highlights Aliona's bad work is that she's had 2 of the best male celebs to work with in the last 2 years, (of the 3 she has been in) & her choreography has appeared to let them down (I know it's not over yet for Harry). There's clearly an improvement in her choreography this year, but she'd still have faced an early exit with a less able celeb. Partnered with a Dan or Audley she'd have been 1 of the 1st eliminations - remember Rav?!!

But ending on a positive note, as I said earlier, she's clearly improved this year. (Let's wait & see who she gets next year!!)

Standing ovations seem easy to come by in this series of Strictly.

But if anyone desrves one tonight it's Aliona.....and Harry of course!

Absolutely amazing tonight!!!

I agree with this.

In terms of Aliona's training, its interesting to compare her fast training speed with Matt last year (Matt had a bit of ballet for gymnastics, some self-taught? disco and was trained to British Team level in gymnastics. He also had excelled before when given a weeks Latin training).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=THIss...eature=related

With Harry, who has had the same amount of dance training as Robbie Savage, Aliona has to go much slower and break it down because Harry has never been trained to move his body before, so training and learning is totally alien to him.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1akCRAwHcYg

I've been quick to slate Aliona for her content-lite choreography but that QS tonight was a proper dance and no mistake.

Excellent.

This is the other reason I think the argument against Aliona confuses me - how is getting to the final letting someone down? If her choreography really was that woeful and putting off people, she and Matt wouldn't have got the votes. Fanbase alone can't carry you the whole way to the final, as Ann Widdecombe proved. They were never going to win last year, Kara and Artem were too good and had it all - the story, the journey, the injury crisis, the class and style - everything that meant they deserved the win. Matt and Aliona were fabulous, but not winners even before that showdance (which is my personal low point for Aliona's choreography, though Artem didn't do much better)

The fact is, she stuck to the rules as they were last year, and utilised them to create routines that clearly won over the public and did get high marks from the judges. I don't like props, but I can't deny that she used them creatively - the swing in the VW was much better than whoever it was (Scott I think?) dancing around a cauldron on Halloween week. She did nothing wrong in terms of the rules of the show, and while I'd love to see her choreograph more dances that are pure dance, until props are banned, no-one can blame her or any of the pros for using them as they do grab attention.

At the end of the day, Kara and Artem used nearly as many props as Matt and Aliona, Artem's choreography was almost as creative as Aliona's (AS, anyone?), yet it's Aliona who gets slated and Artem's a creative genius. I just don't get how they're so different in the end, and how it seems to be impossible on here to like them both...

Well said!

I like both Artem and Aliona's choreography - they are both similar and different.

I would expect people to argue that Artem's 'faffing about' choreography with Kara was more stylish than Aliona's with Matt and I wouldn't argue with that. Kara was a more stylish dancer than Matt.

Eg. in the Tango last year, Artem used a chair and Kara sat on it, lay on it, stood on it and kicked it away during the first 35 seconds. If Aliona had Matt doing that, I suspect she would have recieved more complaints than Artem did.

The way the producers are steering the show, I think Artem and Aliona are doing what the producers want and creating routines that tend to be different and hopefully keep the viewer numbers up. Aliona's Psycho Killer Tango was a very good showdance and would be very entertaining to viewers, provided the low Tango content wasn't a big issue to them.

very well said *claps*