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So You Think You Can Dance: Top 6 perform
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Brandon Bryant and Kayla Rodomski dance a contemporary piece. (Photo: Fox)
I was happy to see Lil C as a guest judge, “pontificating,” but it meant that yet again, Lil C would not be choreographing any buck-like krumping routines. This season has been a little stale, as far as dancing genres goes (out of the top 6, 4 are contemporary dancers), and as I’ve said before, seeing Melissa Sandvig and Evan Kasprzak dancing (and maybe even killing!) a krump would've been just the buzz the two – and the show – needed in this last week before the finale. Russian folk dancing aside, much of the time, when the show has taken a risk and indulged in a new genre of dance, it's produced good results. But, for whatever reason, there will be no krumping this season. It’s a shame, but so it goes. And in fact, it seems to reflect the Top 6 dancers themselves, who, as Nigel Lythgoe remarked at the start of the show, are some of the most talented dancers the show’s ever had, but haven’t had “a moment” in which they grabbed America’s attention, as dancers like Twitch Boss, Joshua Allen, or Katee Shean did last season.
The evening started out with the guys dancing Sonya Tayeh’s Phantom-of-the-Opera-meets-the-Oompa-Loompa’s combative jazz piece (Sonya said she found inspiration for this piece in Willy Wonka). It was a display of strength and control (as well as synchronized backflipping), where each stop-motion moment created a clear and definite picture, which the judges all complimented. While all three of the guys seemed to bring their fiercest moves and attitudes, I felt that if there was anyone who got lost in the shuffle, it was Brandon Bryant, despite his clean and fluid dancing.
Ade Obayomi and Jeanine Mason danced a Louis van Amstel samba – and in his words, it was supposed to be H-O-T. On stage, Jeanine shook the feather boa on her bum with convincing sexiness and I thought much of the footwork was excellent. But as a fan of more traditional sambas, this one felt a little chaotic to me, and Mary Murphy said as much when she called the first fifteen seconds “a revelation,” and the rest, simply “novice.” And sadly, no one in the crowd booed at this. Lil C and Nigel both verbally ogled Jeanine for a moment, to much applause, and then, both admitted their disappointment with the performance.
Melissa Sandvig chose Evan Kasprzak and together, they danced a Tyce Diorio Broadway piece, centered around the song, “Get Me To The Church On Time.” From the first, this seemed like the perfect routine for Evan, with his practiced jazz hands and hammy facial expressions. But that ended up being a bit of the problem – Evan’s performance seemed more cheesy than energetic, but I’m not sure whether this was Evan’s fault, the music’s, or Tyce’s. Melissa, for her part, seemed to do what she could with a slightly cartoonish routine and appeared to be having a good time. Again, Lil C copped to having high expectations, but still called Evan “disappointing” and while Mary shrieked that the routine was “get me to the finale on time,” she remarked that the performance was less than it could’ve been.
Kayla Rodomksi was matched up with Brandon Bryant, and they were given a Stacey Tookey contemporary piece about a mistress who can’t leave her man. This was an interesting match, since they are probably the most technically gifted dancers on the show as well as excellent at inhabiting the characters they’re given in a dance, but maybe less gifted at connecting with the audience. This dance was full of intense movements and tortured expressions and yet, it was hard for me to go beyond appreciation of the technique and really buy into the story of the dance. Lil C called it “intense” and "beyond amazing,” because Kayla found her technical match in Brandon. Mary deemed it “absolutely exquisite,” while Nigel called the technique brilliant, but the chemistry “lacking a little something.”
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