Maybe it's just me, but the "street" dancers are having a much better time of it this year on SYTYCD. You may recall questions about Joshua's dance background after he auditioned as a hip hop dancer.
Joshua's
bio now reads:
Q: Do you have any formal dance training?
A: Yes.
Q: If you had to categorize your dance style, what would it be?
A: Performer.
Still, it doesn't change the fact that Joshua "auditioned" as a hip hopper.
There are three other non-formal dance specialists:
Gev, who seems remarkably at home no matter what style of dance he's performing, answers, "Not Really," to the question of whether he's had any formal dance training, and consistent with his audition he describes himself as a "Break dancer." Yet during his hip hop routine with partner Courtney, it was Courtney (the "contemporary" dancer) who delivered the hard hits, leaving Gev looking a bit like he was out of his element.
Comfort, who took the female "hip hop dancer, popper" spot in the top 20 explains, "I do have formal dance training because I attend Booker T Washington High School of Performing Arts for 2 and a half years." Yet like Gev, when choreographed in her own genre of dance, her performance fell flat.
Contrast those with
Twitch--who we met last season and
know, despite getting formal training over the past year, was a "freestyle" dancer
first--and how he delivers when asked to krump:
What does it look like to you? Suspicious at all? Fans of the show know that there are a certain number of spots reserved for non-professional dancers in the top 20, just as there are spots for the various styles of professional dance. But which category is the more competitive? Would a ballroom dancer be better off learning a hip hop routine to audition with? Are professional dancers doing the same as Twitch, except they're learning to pop and break, and in the process discovering that professional discipline applied to the non-professional dance styles leads to relatively impressive results. Meaning,
are hip hop, breaking, popping and the like not really that hard after all, at least not for a serious dancer with professional training? Leaving the contemporary dancer who learns hip hop the option of passing on head to head competition with the other, professional, contemporary dancers, and instead competing against the fewer in number and one dimensional hip hop dancers.
Remember the pop locker Robert Murraine? Is it possible that he was the only "true" "amateur" in Las Vegas this year?