So You Think You Can Dance: LALA Land

Summer’s almost over, but the powers that be at FOX have decided that fall is the new summer, and I couldn’t be more ecstatic. So You Think You Can Dance is back for its sixth season and its first September debut. So what if Jeanine got the shaft with the shortest champion run out of all of our SYTYCD winners. It’s not like she lost or anything. (Okay, I do feel bad for her, but not enough to let it put a damper on my happiness!) So let’s see how things turned out for our contestants in LALA land. Who’s heading to Las Vegas? Who came thiiiiis close? And who burned out on national television?

WAKING UP IN VEGAS
Mollee Gray is a bowl of sugar. She’s an aw shucks, sweet girl and a strong dancer. She’s also been a dancer in High School Musical 1, 2 & 3. It’s not the best performance that I think she can give, but I think we’ll see more from her. And she chose Postal Service as her music, so thumbs up!

Ryan Kasprzak has a lot going for him. He was the last boy cut last season, and his brother made it to the finale last season as well. But counting against him is the fact that no tap dancer has ever made it to the top 20. He really performs. There’s no music, only his tapping shoes, his voice and his fingers tapping, but it’s enough.

Bianca Revels complained over and over again that she wouldn’t return after being cut multiple times, but did you really believe her? She’s the second person to keep tap alive, and she even gets to battle (Apparently, it’s actually called trading) Ryan. It was sweet. And though no one was declared the winner, she got a ticket.

Amber Williams’s mother is paralyzed from the waist down, so seeing her dance definitely evokes some strong emotions. The personality wasn’t there for me, but she’s a beautiful girl and a very great technical dancer.

Christina Santana is our first Latin dancer. She and her partner Pepe are pretty much insane, and they do something a little different, trying a lot of separate in sync choreography as well as all Latin partner moves. She says she does ballet, jazz and belly dancing, but the belly dancing didn’t seem all that great, so I will wait to see if she can REALLY do other genres.

Phillip Attmore was Ryan’s roommate when they toured with Fosse. (By the way, I love me some Fosse.) I think he has a lot of heart. You can definitely feel how much he loves what he can do. And the footwork was strong. Sometimes you have to strain to hear every shuffle, but he was all power.

We didn’t get to see a lot of Alexie Agedeppa or Paula van Oppen but from the snippets we got, they were gorgeous both physically and talent-wise. David Hovhannisyan, Amanda Kirby and Brandon Dumlao were a few other dancers we got to see a brief glimpse of.

THANKFULLY YOU MISSED IT
Cole Clemons, the first auditioned, must have never seen the show because he thought a theatrical piece without music would get him through. No one even clapped in the audience! At least Sex got more than that.

Christopher Aguilar wants to make movies. He’s inspired by Ginger Rogers, and he’s written a thesis about how changing the character of Velma in Chicago to a male character might or might not affect the storyline. He loves jazz hands and shimmying and lands on his knees, painfully, when he attempt flips.

WRAP IT UP
If this episode is a glimpse of how all the auditions will go then things have definitely changed. Having Adam Shankman on the panel reminds me that it’s still my old SYTYCD, but they barely focused on the terrible dancers (I’m okay with that).  We also didn’t get to see any dancers who didn’t go straight through to Vegas. They glossed over the choreography, and then showed us a montage of people who finally made it, though we saw none of their dancing or even their names.

Unlike summer when there’s very little on, they’ll only get one show per week for auditions. I know you know what I’m thinking. We have a long way to go. We’re going to be watching audition rounds until October 6th, and we won’t know the top 20 until October 21st. But hang in there because if the performers are any indication of the dancers we’ll be seeing over the next eight weeks, then we have quite the show ahead of us.

Until next week in Arizona!

Season 6, Episodes 1: Audition Show #1 (originally aired September 9, 2009)

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Wednesdays at 8/7c on Fox

Photographs courtesy of Fox and IMDbPro