(back)

Corridor’s Michael Cook no amateur in TV show’s newest incarnation

By M.V. Moorhead

It’s a cliché, but it appears to be true--everything comes back, sooner or later. Even Dance Fever, a syndicated, Merv Griffin-produced TV series that showed up very late to the disco party—1979—and decided, after disco died, to stick around for the ‘80s, has pulled its dancing shoes on once again.

The show was simply a dance contest, with a substantial cash prize for the winners. And a formula like that doesn’t go away so easily.

Kyrene Corridor resident and Ballet Arizona performer Michael Cook is now a contestant on the new incarnation of Dance Fever, Sunday nights on ABC Family, and has come as far as the Wild Card Round.

This success is all the more impressive because Cook, unlike many of the other dancers on the show, is working in a classical-dance mode--a self-choreographed routine set to a piece of music called Eclipse from Cirque de Soleil.

As Cook himself notes:

“For the most part all of the trained dancers haven’t been doing so well, because they go for the flash, the breakdancers, and that doesn’t take a lot of technical training.”

But technical training is exactly what 21-year-old Phoenix-native Cook has plenty of. He’s trained everywhere from Tempe Dance Academy, where he now teaches, to the American School of Ballet in New York, studying everything from classic ballet to jazz to modern dance and flamenco.

“My Mom, when I was five, took me to a friend of hers daughter’s recital, and the director approached me and asked me if I wanted to dance,” recalls Cook of his introduction to the light-footed art.

“It’s just something I’ve always loved.”

This love affair is requited—Cook, who lives with his wife Holly and baby daughter Maya, is already a highly accomplished dancer.

He’s appeared with Ballet Arizona for the last four seasons, and not in just any capacity—he was Romeo in Romeo and Juliet and the prodigal in Prodigal Son, among other principal roles.

It was his students who told him about Dance Fever, for which, having applied so belatedly, he had to travel to Chicago to audition.

After years in the world of serious artistic dance, Cook definitely noticed the difference when he shifted to the glitzy world of TV.

“It was fun,” he says of the Dance Fever experience. “But the producers really wanted drama, they wanted a ‘reality’ show. They wanted us to bash each other. But dancers aren’t like that.”

The producers had to settle for civility, Cook insists.

“I don’t think one person did it,” he says. “So I think it became a different kind of show.”

Cook, who’s sworn to secrecy about the final outcome of the contest, will appear in at least one more episode of Dance Fever, the Wild Card Round airing Aug. 17.

The grand prize of $100,000 would certainly buy a lot of tights and ballet shoes for Michael, and perhaps eventually for Maya.

Whatever the outcome of the show, Cook expects to be dancing in Swan Lake at Ballet Arizona next season.

Asked if he’ll be dancing the lead in that production, he proves just as cagey as he is about Dance Fever:

“We won’t know until next year.”

(back)