SYTYCD - S6 Auditions 1 & 2

So You Think You Can Dance is back, less than a month after Jeanine Mason was crowned "America's Favorite Dancer" for their fifth season. Apparently, the FOX network wanted it to be a fall series, more than likely so it can run alongside the (absolutely brilliant and hysterically funny) series Glee. Executive Producer Nigel Lythgoe has promised some changes for this season: first, with their fall schedule somewhat hemmed in by baseball season, S6 may run slightly shorter than the previous five. Producers are mulling a six-person (top three men, top three women) finale episode.

More interestingly, as Nigel is known for liking a three-judge system (he was a producer on American Idol for years), SYTYCD is filling the third seat that was traditionally for a guest judge with a new resident judge: director and choreographer Adam Shankman. I think it's a good fit; "Shankers" has a great, upbeat personality without ever straying into the grating and shrieking of Mary Murphy. Also, this affords the show a greater pool of choreographers each week, as the guest judges are unable to choreograph on the week they're judging.


The show begins its new round of auditions in Los Angeles. Mercifully, that miscreant "Sex" is nowhere to be seen. On particular display are some great standouts, including three of the best tap dancers I've ever seen. Ryan Kasprzak, elder brother of S5's Evan got his ticket to Las Vegas on the strength of a delightfully poetic unaccompanied performance piece (of course, we saw that a couple of months back, but it's nice to revisit). Bianca Revels, who vowed to not return after being cut late in the game in Vegas, swallowed her pride and impressed her way through a "trade" with Ryan (not quite a battle). Phillip Attmore is another fantastic tapper who really emulates the nonchalant makes-it-look-easy style of the best dancers from the Thirties and Forties. Another standout the camera will likely find often is Mollee Gray, a girl from Utah with an adult dancer's body and a 12 year-old girl's face. She was a principal dancer in all three High School Musical movies and moved to L.A. to get more dance work. She's excellent.

They're hitting new cities this time around. Episode two takes us to Phoenix, AZ and the broiler-like heat that comes with the place. While there weren't a lot of dancers that blew me away, what I did notice was that the not so great dancers, for the most part, all had really good attitudes about things. Even those mismatched poppers from the start of the show, took everything in stride, bowed out gracefully and stayed positive. And yes, there was a lot of weird, but it was generally entertaining weird, so that's a big plus that this show has over, say, Idol. I spend so much of those auditions wanting to smack sense and humility into people. Willem de Vries and Jacob Jason are there to dance some same-sex Latin (a Rumba, to be precise), and we all gird ourselves for Nigel's reaction. He ends up praising their lines and how they combined expressiveness with strength, and both Mia and Mary get teary and wibbly over them. What did these two have over the couple from last season? Willem and Jacob are really good dancers. Those other guys weren't so much which added to the lead-switching, the unfortunate catsuit costumes and the fact that one dude dropped the other dude on a lift, didn't make them the best ambassadors for same-sex dancing.

See you next week when SYTYCD hits the city that taught me how to dance, Boston, Massachusetts!