After Christopher Guest’s Best In Show, it seemed like every dog show eccentricity had been captured and heightened to such an extent that the actual thing just wouldn’t be funny anymore. But, as always, even the most ridiculous fiction is no match for the endless absurdity of reality. Consider, for example, a woman and her dog performing a choreographed dance routine to Evanescence’s “Bring Me To Life” at the 2020 Crufts dog show.
Thanks to a recent tweet from @qDot that excerpts this remarkable instance of canine-human performance art, we now know that the UK dog show hosts a competitive event called the International Freestyle Heelwork To Music. As the above clip shows, this contest inspires people to do things like spend hours working with their pet until their canine brains have wrapped around the structure of Evanescence singles and their owner’s strange human body cues well enough to dance around in time to music.
Look at this performance! Imagine the training regimen that went into teaching this dog how to weave between its owner’s legs and that, most importantly, it should do a little barrel roll or running jump when the chorus kicks in. Imagine the long days spent listening to “Bring Me To Life,” pockets filled with kibble, until the dog had learned to sit up on its back legs or hold hands during the song’s bridge. Reflect on the emotional intensity of two species coming together as one to create art.
If you want more where this came from—and we suspect you do—we’re happy to say that Crufts has made the entire 2020 International Freestyle Heelwork To Music competition available online. In the first part alone, we see not only the Swiss team’s Evanescence dance, but also a Hungarian duo performing to music from Beauty And The Beast, a team from Denmark where a human dressed in a witch costume and her companion dance to the Hocus Pocus theme song, and a Norwegian woman in a fox costume frolicking around a fake Christmas tree with her border collie.
The next Crufts dog show is set to begin on July 15th, which is good since, if 2020's installment of the Freestyle Heelwork competition is anything to go by, we now have something to look forward to this year.
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14 Comments
Take:The first Evanescence album is great.It gets lumped in with nu-metal because of the feature on this song, but, it isn’t.It’s just a great poppy, Rock album. Amy Lee has a phenomenal voice and worked great with Ben Moody.And it’s a shame neither really reached heights afterwards as Evanescence and We Are The Fallen, respectively. Some Good stuff but not That first album great.
Take – the album is pure shit, and while Lee does have a great voice it doesn’t fit that shitty music. Agreed it’s badly lumped into “Nu-Metal” but come on man: it’s pretty shitty.
Just disagree.Going Under, My Immortal, Everybody’s Fool, Bring Me to Life, My Last Breath (which was good enough to straight up be copied as a wrestlers entrance theme), it’s a good album.
You are entitled to your opinion, Sir or Ma’am.
Realizing that this song is 17 years old just made me sad
Been watching Chilling Adventures of Sabrina and those high school kids seem to have an affinity for early 80’s glam rock like Billy Idol, the B-52’s, Queen, which I also listened to in High School…when they were new releases.
When I was in grad school I had Animal Planet on in the background a lot while I worked, and was absolutely delighted to come across their coverage of a dog dancing competition at one point, complete with all the standard trappings you’d associate with gymnastics or ice skating, etc – the two commentators, one a former performer, the other a less-informed person who can have things explained to them, the curtained off “room” where people can be interviewed about how their performance went, etc, except that the performances themselves were clearly happening in some low-budget rented ballroom in a Holiday Inn somewhere.
Also: if people follow Kyle because of the cute dog content, I hope they’re not too startled when his tweets get back to work-related content, which for him is mostly thing about internet-enabled sex toys.
So weird to hear that song and it not be part of a badly fan made anime music video
Now if only the next dog was dancing to Linkin Park…
Korn Dog
Crufts supports animal cruelty in the form of inbreeding and deliberately manipulating bloodlines to produce unhealthy unnatural looking dogs to fit their insane “breeding standards”. https://www.peta.org.uk/blog/crufts/
Also check out the dog dancing segment on the Netflix series, “We Are the Champions”.
oh, brother……