If I may paraphrase Adam Shankman: Nigel, thank you for taking our notes. Well, some of them anyway. Last week was a shaky start for SYTYCD, to the point where I was starting to seriously believe this was the beginning of the end. I’m still not totally sold on this iteration of the show, but you can see things starting to gel a little better this go-round. Let’s give it up for incremental improvement!
First off, the All-Star thing was handled better this week. Though it was a little jarring returning to the picking-out-of-a-hat sequence after it being gone for so long, it did help to spell out just how in the hell this whole All Star thing works: Contestants pick an All Star’s name out of the hat, then the All Star reveals the genre they’ll be dancing. And there are some wildcards in that mix, as we saw tonight with Kathryn being the Bollywood ambassador and Dominick throwing out “lyrical hip-hop” for the first time in the show’s run. The producers also seemed to realize how awkward it was to have the All Stars disappear during the judging, which seems to have led to the awesome new development of All Stars standing up for their partners against those pesky judges. And you know what? When we’re talking about crump, I’m much more inclined to believe what Comfort says than Lord Featherhead over there.
The judges also toned down their mugging quite a bit this week. There was still a fair amount of cheesy jokes and bad attempts at creating a catchphrase (“Dance is a hearform,” UGH), but at least Nigel only brought up the World Cup once tonight. The judges’ critiques, on the other hand, continued to be troubling. Very rarely tonight did I find myself in agreement with them, and several times I found myself wondering if we had watched the same dance. Let’s review:
Christina: Christina continues to vex me with her blandness and heavy feet. I know we have some ballroom dancers in the crowd here, so please correct me if I’m way off the mark here, but she lacks both the grace and the fire I expect of the ballroom dancers on this show, and pairing her with Pasha for a paso doble only highlighted that. Now granted, I’m on record as not caring for the paso doble, so perhaps I’m biased, but I saw none of the “passion, power, fire, and control” the judges were going on about. I have yet to see Christina approach anything resembling “sexy,” and all of the lifts felt clumsy and heavy—which could theoretically be just as much Pasha’s fault… but come on, it’s Pasha.
Adechike: My friend texted me during this performance, “Adechike and Mandy Moore: a match made in shit.” I didn’t hate this performance quite that much—and hey, at least Mandy used a song from this millennium. (Well, a 2005 remix of a 1988 song at least. Probably as modern as we’re going to get from her.) But I actually line up with the judges on this one: Adechike’s dancing is so calculated that his attempts at emotion come across extremely forced and occasionally creepy. He reminded me a lot of season five’s Vitolio tonight, particularly at the routine’s conclusion, where his “serene smile” read more along the lines of “I want to wear your skin.” So far, partnering does not seem to be Adechike’s strong suit, at least in cases where he has to interact emotionally with his partner. On the other hand, I’d like to see him do a hip-hop number before I’m ready to completely count him out; judging from his photographs—or what’s left of them after that fire—he has some experience, and I think his cool demeanor might work better there.
Alex: Here’s another one where I’ll defer to Adam: “Everything was at 11, the were no big explosive movements. It was a lot of flash and no smolder.” Very true, and Fosse certainly demands some smolder—or as Mia would put it, “ssssssssssss”—but when that flash is Alex doing one seemingly inhuman jump or stretch after another, it’s still pretty damn good. Tyce really stacked the deck by giving him a ton of those moves, and it’s hard to smolder with your leg extended 180 degrees above your head.
Ashley: So Nigel decides it’s finally time to start critiquing the choreographer, and he chooses to start with… Travis? For this routine? Whether it met his definition of “jazz” or not, it was a gorgeous routine, and danced beautifully by Ashley. She managed to keep my eyes on her and not Mark’s chest (holy jeez…), and I can pay her no bigger compliment than that. It’s not her fault that she's picked two styles very in line with her own—contemporary and jazz-that-might-be-more-contemporary—so it feels little disingenuous of the judges to say they haven’t learned anything new about her. Maybe if she had gotten crump…
Billy: Okay. Here’s where the judges really started to piss me off. Not necessarily because Billy had some mad crumping skills—he was capable, but not revelatory—but because they failed to acknowledge the fact that, for a skinny, effeminate white boy, he did pretty damn good. They go on later to praise the hell out of Jose’s Bollywood routine and Melinda’s contemporary performance, but the similarly out-of-his-element Billy gets trashed. Is it because he’s so damn good that they ride him harder? Whatever the case, I think this routine was about as good as could be expected given the elements that went into it, and I thought Billy gave a highly entertaining performance. (Did anyone else get a distinct Benji vibe?)
Robert: The judges were split on this one, but I’m not: Robert got swallowed up by Anya in the Argentine tango, despite him throwing out every sexyface in his arsonal. But, as Mia pointed out, he wasn’t grounded throughout the routine, which sacrificed a lot of his strength and power, making him come off kinda wimpy. Passion goes beyond the face, and while his eyes may have smoldered, his body seemed to be saying, “Oh God what’s happening?!”