Yessssss! Summer can officially begin! That's right, "So You Think You Can Dance" officially premiered last night and I can't wait to see how this season shapes up. Oh, how I've missed Nigel's snarky remarks and Mary's psychotic laugh and ear-piercing shrieks (okay, that second one We've still got a couple nights' worth of auditions, so I'll keep it to some of my favorite moments until we reach the Top 20. First up, last night's auditions in NYC and Denver:
- Gabi Rojas, a 24-year-old circus performer from Albuquerque, kicked off the New York auditions and blew everyone away. Her performance was subtle and birdlike, but she moved beautifully. Even though she suffers from rheumatoid arthritis, her performance was graceful and stunning. No surprise, she got a ticket straight to Vegas.
- Storyboard P and Hobgoblin (I swear those are the names they gave ... hopefully their mothers didn't actually name them that), the self-proclaimed inventors of a "dance" style called mutation, were scary both in looks (their faces were covered with puke-green face paint) and in dancing (which was about 90 percent contortionism and 10 percent ... hip-hop?). The judges gave them a shot at the choreography, but after watching the rest of the auditions, the duo decided the competition wasn't for them and they bowed out (probably a wise move on their part).
- Peter Sabasino, the 21-year-old Italian tap dancer, might have looked ridiculous in his capri-length baggy sport shorts and skin-tight wife beater, but his audition was great. Usually tappers don't make it to the Top 20, let alone Vegas, but this guy shows a lot of promise and is apparently trained in all the basics. The judges sent him straight through to Vegas. Could my hope of a tapper in the Top 20 finally come true?!
- Short, Tokyo-born Nobuya, who I initially wrote-off as a joke audition after he told the camera all the styles he'd been learning lately, was actually a pretty decent hip-hop dancer. He mostly did locking, with plenty of comedy to entertain the crowd, and, after some choreography, he got a ticket to sin city.
- Tiffany Geigel was born with a disease that prevented her spine from forming properly — she has three vertebrae whereas the average human has seven — and was expected to die shortly after birth. She is now 23 years old and auditioned despite the pain, ridicule and knowledge that she would not make it onto the show. Tiffany is truly an extraordinary human being and a lovely dancer. The judges gave her an honest critique of her dancing, which they said was unbelievably fantastic given her situation but ultimately not right for the show, and gave her huge praise for having the courage to audition and told her to continue dancing.
- Latin ballroom couple Igor Zabrodin and Nina Estrina did a perfectly adept routine, which ended with a Pot Stir (a move in which Igor spins Nina, she scrunches down and looks like she's spinning on her knees) that went on forever — and it was incredible. They both stuck around for the choreography, but only Igor makes it through to Vegas in the end.
- The next ballroom couple to take the floor was a bit ... different. Misha Belfer and Mitchel Kibel were the first all-male ballroom couple to ever try out. Before the audition began Mitchel, who previously danced with female partners and is supposedly the "straight" one, desperately tried to convince the audience that two men dancing together could be very masculine. I don't know who he was trying to kid, especially decked out in that sequined, spandex onesie cut to the navel, but I figured I'd give the guys a chance. Their samba was actually going pretty well, at least until Misha swung into Mitchel's legs during a lift/spin move and they both fell down ... HARD. But rather than critiquing the guys' actual dancing, Nigel went on to berate them with a slew of homophobic comments ("I think you'd probably alienate a lot of our audience. We've always had the guys dance together on the show but they've never really done it in each other's arms before.") Mary said she was too distracted by them switching between leading and following to comment on their actual dancing. I'm not saying these guys deserved to make it onto the show (we've seen much better sambas than that), and I'm not saying it wasn't a little difficult to adjust to at first, but I was disgusted that the judges ONLY commented on their being a same-sex ballroom couple and ignored the dancing aspect all together. All in all, the guys went onto choreography (Nigel wanted to see them dancing with girls; "Who knows, you might even like it," he said) and were ultimately cut.
Next week: more auditions. They can be entertaining at times, but I wish they would cut the auditions down to like ... two two-hour shows rather than five? Six? I can never remember how many of these we have to sit through before we finally whittle it down to the best of the best.
