So You Think You Can Dance: Auditions: Los Angeles

Has it been a month already? The Season Five live tour hasn’t even kicked off yet, and here we are, weeding through another round of auditions for So You Think You Can Dance. What will that quick turnaround mean for Season Six? Some of the commenters last season speculated that the producers were saving the hot-shot talent for the inaugural fall season, where SYTYCD will be going up more “legitimate” regular-season programming. Or, alternately, the lack of rebound time from last season could result in fatigue on the part of the viewers, the cast/creators, or both. (Certainly the full six weeks of audition/Vegas shows on the horizon signals to a bit of bloat, at the very least.)
We won’t really know until the performance shows kick off on Oct. 28, but tonight’s audition show certainly featured a few possible trends that may or may not carry over to the season proper. Let’s break ’em down:
Return of “the season of the tapper.”
Season Five’s auditions saw a surge of tap dancing, a style that until then had barely blipped on the SYTYCD radar. (Nigel’s guest performance notwithstanding.) A quick look back over last season’s write-ups shows at least four tappers featured in auditions, with at least three making it on to Vegas, prompting me to speculate then that a top 20 tapper seemed likely. Alas, my powers of prediction are laughable, and none of them went on to compete. But just a few months later, Ryan “America’s 21st-favorite dancer” Kasprzak and Bianca “I won’t be coming back next year JUST KIDDING” Revels are back in the judges’ warm embraces, along with Ryan’s former roommate and touring partner, Phillip Atmore. If I may speculate, a top 20 tapper seems likely.
Or does it? While the Ryan/Bianca tap-battle (excuse me, “trading”) was the most memorable moment of the night, and Phillip’s megawatt smile and hyper-fast feet were super-endearing, I’m a little dubious as to how successful tap can be on SYTYCD. Not that I have anything against the style—I took an entire year of tap lessons when I was 4 years old, thankyouverymuch. But it seems to me that tap is to dancing what jazz is to music: an incredibly technical style that’s exhilarating to those who understand it, and either boring or bewildering to those who don’t. Granted, if there’s any show that can make such an esoteric dance style accessible to the masses, it’s SYTYCD—hello, Trepak—but I think Nigel’s dreams of “the year of the tappers” might be a little farfetched. I think we’ll be lucky to see one in the top 20, and despite Ryan’s history with the show, I think the oh-so-camera-ready Phillip might pull out a dark-horse upset.
Contemporary glut