Tonight was the first night for Dancing with the Stars eliminations, with the two couples on the gauntlet being Pamela Anderson and her partner Damian Whitewood, alongside Shannen Doherty and her partner Mark Ballas.
After an encore performance of Nicole Scherzinger and Derek Hough’s Monday night Jive, the couples that were staying were slowing revealed.
Then there was a painful musical performance from The Beach Boys with special guest John Stamos – I must admit I changed the channel for a moment at this point.
Finally, with about four minutes remaining in the broadcast we found out the first Dancing with the Stars casualty this season is Shannen Doherty and Mark Ballas.
Come to find out Mark Ballas hurt himself during the dress rehearsal, and had he and Shannen made it through this first elimination, he would have had to bow out of the competition; replacing himself with his father as Shannen’s partner.
History of The Jive
To jazz musicians who were the players of swing music in the 1930s and 1940s “Jive” was an expression denoting glib or foolish talk.
American soldiers brought Lindy Hop/Jitterbug to Europe around 1940, where this dance swiftly found a following among the young. In the United States the term Swing became the most common word used to describe the dance. In the UK variations in technique led to styles such as Boogie-Woogie and Swing Boogie, with “Jive” gradually emerging as the generic term.
After the war, the boogie became the dominant form for popular music. It was, however, never far from criticism as a foreign, vulgar dance. The famous ballroom dancing guru, Alex Moore, said that he had “never seen anything uglier”. English instructors developed the elegant and lively ballroom Jive, danced to slightly slower music. In 1968 it was adopted as the fifth Latin dance in International competitions. The modern form of ballroom jive in the 1990s-present, is a very happy and boppy dance, the lifting of knees and the bending or rocking of the hips often occurs.