While juke has had some moderate mainstream success – including MTV plays of Dude 'n Nem's 2007 single Watch My Feet and one dancer, Full Effect, making an appearance on the MTV series America's Best Dance Crew – footwork is yet to follow suit.
When he transferred his bouncy limb-flinging choreographic style from his own modern-dance troupe to the Ailey dancers, the effect was explosive.
The never-to-be-realized concerts were meant to be multimedia extravaganzas — with 3-D videos, Broadway-like numbers with backup dancers, hologramlike effects and an elaborate save-the-Earth sequence — but it is Jackson alone on the stage who commands everyone's attention.
Has this new kind of dancer had an effect on his own increasingly funky choreographic style?
A live dancer (Scott Heron) in effect becomes his heel and feet, videotaped close up by a camera posed at the level of the wooden table that he moves across and projected huge on a screen behind him.
Masquerading as high spirits, the busy finale reminds one of a rustic dancer fighting the effects of a hangover.
That said, this is a well-made production that tells its story legibly and movingly, and shows off Northern Ballet's dancers to fine effect.
Ms. Miller clearly believes in sweat, and as the vigorous dancing progresses, the white makeup gets splotchy and blood rises under the dancers' skin, an effect that makes them look like victims of sloppy sunblock application.
Its ballet company is the world's largest, allowing it to stage productions like "La Bayadère," which at one point in Act III fills the whole stage with identical white-clad dancers, to hypnotic effect.
As the soloist creates fluid shapes, an infrared camera captures her movements and communicates them to a computer, which produces a graphic response that is then projected onto the dancer, generating striking effects: an aura, a constellation, and even something like an aurora borealis.
