Basketball Team Performs 35-Minute Interpretive Dance of ’08-’09 Season at Midnight Madness
Coach John Thompson III during the pivotal "Carrier Dome OT" portion of the final movement
McDONOUGH—The Georgetown men’s basketball team surprised fans attending Midnight Madness Friday night by performing a long, emotional, minutely choreographed interpretive dance of last year’s disappointing season.
“In the past, this has been a fun event for our guys to show off their dance skills to their favorite songs as they are introduced for the first time to the fans,” said Coach John Thompson III in his prologue. “I felt this year we needed to do something slightly different to exorcise the demons of last season and bring us closer together as a team.”
Programs distributed to students on their way into the arena said that the first movement was called “Birth of a 6’11 Center.” The dance opened in the pitch-black gymnasium with a single spotlight on center court, where a giant green plant slowly opened to reveal Hoya star recruit Greg Monroe, nude and covered in some sort of yellow film. Soon, his eyes opened and Monroe stepped out of the plant, dancing in a traditional ballet style to a selection from Ives’ Universe Symphony. Soon the entire team was out on the court, dressed in gray tights and holding each other’s hands in a circle around Monroe.
After the end of the first movement, which featured the team strutting ever closer to Monroe until they engulfed him and dressed him in a tunic dazzled with neon-blue lights, there was a pause in the production. The audience seemed stunned but eventually realized they were supposed to applaud.
Traditional Chinese music blared through the speakers of McDonough and bright red lights shone on the court in the second movement as the team gathered together under a blue-and-gray Chinese dragon costume, representing the team’s unity in its first journey to the Verizon Center in Chinatown and its perfect record there in the beginning of the season. Freshman Vee Sanford was spotlighted in front of the dragon, dressed in an ornamented Chinese Jack the Bulldog costume. Sanford danced in unison with the dragon and the music, advancing toward a series of cardboard boxes with the logos of the seven straight teams defeated at home and ripping the boxes apart one by one.
“I’m gonna be straight with you—we had a lot of trouble casting Jack the Bulldog,” Thompson said in a press conference afterwards, during which he revealed the secrets of his creative process and answered a random off-topic question about the Princeton offense. “I thought maybe this was all gonna fall apart, but Vee stepped up and tapped into a primal spirit inside of him that really brought Jack the Bulldog to life. And the chaotic, beastlike dance you saw in the show is very close to how he originally improvised it.”
After the second movement’s applause break was over, the gymnasium’s regular fluorescent lights came on and the team perfectly choreographed their exact positions during each of Georgetown’s 53 field-goal attempts in the December 29 game against UConn, all set to a discordant version of the fight song played by the G.U. Pep Band. The part of Jesse Sapp was played by John Thompson Jr., and Jack the Bulldog himself came on as DaJuan Summers, wearing Summers’ trademark beard. Spectacularly, the team, including the dog, who was in a harness and controlled by a series of wires operated by Fr. Chris Steck, made each and every basket they did in the December game. They gathered together at the end of the movement, called “UConn,” for a celebratory, in-unison Soulja Boy dance.
McDonough quickly turned dark again and spotlights slowly came up on Chris Wright and Jack the Bulldog at opposite ends of the gym while “The Rumble” from the musical West Side Story played. Wright and Jack slowly high-stepped towards another until they were full-on dance-fighting. Both fell to the ground and sat there for a few seconds until a giant bright-green ball of fire marked “NBA” shone near the exercise equipment above the bleachers. Jack rose up and flew through the air towards the ball of fire as John Thompson III, in a billowing silver kente-cloth robe and wielding the Georgetown mace, ran after him. Jack slipped into a Detroit Pistons jersey and disappeared into the ball of fire.
Red lights came on again as JTIII and the team gathered at center court to continue their Soulja Boy dance in the final movement, “The Fall,” this time set to the “Liebestod” aria from Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde. The dancers quickly became out of sync with one another and fainted, one by one, to the floor. JTIII was the only one left dancing as the song climaxed, the head coach desperately trying to pick up his players and get them to keep dancing until he too finally fell down onto the hardwood. The women’s basketball team, wearing red masks and St. John’s uniforms, came onto the court, covering the bodies of the men’s team in a giant red sheet.
After a smattering of applause, the fluorescent lights came back on, and the men’s team, still wearing gray tights, practiced a slam-dunk drill while the crowd filed out. Greg Monroe slipped on some of the yellow film that still covered his body and much of center court, breaking both wrists and putting him out for the season.
