‘Floor’ Moves the Feet but Not the Heart

Ever since classical ballet evolved from social dancing, the romance between the stage and the ballroom has remained passionate. “Burn the Floor” turns that romance into hard-sell middlebrow spectacle, enlisting 44 international champions of the competition ballroom world but most often selling them out in stale show-dance routines.

This plotless dance revue just ended a European tour in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, and will launch itself in America on March 29 with three performances at the Universal Amphitheatre. The 80-minute PBS edition on the “Great Performances” series Sunday looks a lot like “Fosse” without Fosse: plenty of hot young dancers on view but no creative strategies beyond the obvious retro sexual hustle dominating most of Anthony Van Laast’s choreography.

The show stays closest to ballroom dancing in a glazed Astaire-Rogers medley, with Bonita Bryg’s bold and often bizarre costumes here making reference to the original film contexts of the accompanying songs (using feathers in “Cheek to Cheek,” for example, and black-and-white corps playoffs in “The Continental”). But costumes and choreography go way, way over the top in a pseudo-Spanish dance drama accompanied by snippets from “Carmen” and filled with every cape-swirling, floor-stamping, body-pawing cliche imaginable.

Sequences based on salsa and jitterbug idioms show the company at its most skillful and attractive--though, once again, it’s revealing how quickly Van Laast abandons genuine social dancing for expansive Broadway-style corps routines.

Moreover, you can rely on television director David Mallet to constantly press the effects button, causing the dancers to go into slow motion or the screen to fill with close-ups of male sweat and female jiggle.

Obviously, audiences new to concert dance will find “Burn the Floor” a primer on the ways that performing prowess and theatrical savvy can sustain excitement. But where’s the artistry and innovation? When you watch world-class ice-skating couples or ice dancers, you see new partnering possibilities develop, daring advances in technique, musicality, style.

But with dozens of champions on view in “Burn the Floor,” all you get is the same-old same-old.

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“Burn the Floor” can be seen Sunday at 8 p.m. on KCET-TV.