shanmonster | Review: Art/Dance Academy 2000 Practice Tape

I recently purchased a copy of Art/Dance Academy 2000 Practice Tape. It features Morwenna Assaf with warm-ups, arm movements, and zilling exercises. I bought this expecting a no-frills tape with lots of good, practical movements useful in a classroom situation. Well, had the production quality been decent, I may have gotten just that. However, the problems overwhelm any good the tape potentially offers.

Something tells me Ms. Assaf decided one day that her next class would be videotaped, so she had her students show up in their pretty outfits. All instruction is offered to the students, and not to the viewers of the tape. She corrects the posture of a student offscreen, which did no good at all for me, because I couldn't see what she was doing.

The camera angle remains the same throughout the video. This itself is not a problem. However, Ms. Assaf is off to the left and quite a distance from the camera. She's therefore rather small, even on a large television. Instead, I am forced to watch a student, who although she appears to be a lovely dancer, is following the movements of the instructor. This means that I'm following a follower, and I have to wonder if I'm doing the same movements the instructor intends. To top it off, the video quality is so poor, the dancers appear initially to have been shot in black and white. They're also slightly out of focus, and the fuzzy look of the video makes it impossible to discern any subtle movements. The group does a whole series of rib movements which are completely lost because of the poor video. And that they're also wearing full skirts which completely obscure all leg and foot movements only compounds the problems with this instructional tape.

To make things worse, the volume is all screwy. The music is much louder than Ms. Assaf's voice. Most of the time, I can't hear her at all. And the few times I can hear her, I must strain my ears to do so.

But there is a problem even more damning than these significant ones. At first, I thought I was just being physically retarded, and couldn't follow along with the movements and music. But when the zilling section started, it became painfully and humourously (all at the same time!) obvious that the sound is lagging approximately two seconds behind the video. When Ms. Assaf tells the dancers to hold, you can see everyone's zills clacking furiously. And when the dancers hold still, the zilling soundtrack begins in earnest.

All these problems together result in a completely useless video tape. Although I do not doubt Ms. Assaf is both a good dancer and instructor (her students look like they know what they're doing), she'd better get her jingly butt back to a better video producer if she expects to sell more instructional tapes. I'm frankly very surprised she's selling such a travesty. I'd be too embarassed to put something of such low quality on the market.