Your guest judges are Mia “America’s Stacey Tookey” Michaels and Rex Harrington.
Tara-Jean and Everett: musical theatre (but actually tap). As impressed as I am that a tap routine – and really, this was just about entirely a tap routine – made it onto a So You Think You Can Dance stage, the partnering portions of this were sometimes weak, and I put that almost entirely on Everett, who’s clearly the lesser half of the pairing. He’s not bad, but he’s hit his level. However, the judges gave this a sloppy blowjob that one might expect of a Bollywood routine, and completely ignored the badly blown final spot where Everett nearly dropped Tara-Jean. So my guess is that even if they make bottom three, they’ll be safe.
Melanie and Cody: jazz. First Melissa Williams routine of the season that didn’t A) kinda suck or B) suck really bad. It only took till top 12! Anyway, even though the routine didn’t suck it was pretty generic, with a couple of awkward pauses (the couple of seconds they had to spend tying on a blindfold that only stayed on for another couple of moves was kind of excruciating). Melanie’s performance quality was amazing, but at this point anything less than “holy shit” from Melanie would be a disappointment. Cody was fine; he needs to be more than “fine” at this point because he’s been with Melanie so long that she is seriously outclassing him.
Corynne and Austin: salsa. Why do we need to import TonyandMelanie ™ when we have Gustavo Vargas, who is almost always better at Latin dance choreography? Answer: I dunno. Anyway, this was an epic clusterfuck, with the judges giving credit for a little hip-shaking on Corynne’s part and completely ignoring her lifting her feet way too high in the basic steps (it almost looked like she was marching at times) and giving Austin too many props for what was only a competent performance on his part. Mia actually nailed it when she called it “forced sexiness” – I kept thinking “my god, just because you wiggle your ass, it doesn’t mean you’re dancing proper salsa.”
Kim and Emanuel: hip-hop. Emanuel was better this week than he was back in top-20 when he and Kim did old-school hip-hop. Granted, that performance was terrible, so perhaps that is damning with faint praise. It was the sort of performance where you say “that was… good,” and you mean the word “good” but still, there is that little pause, you know? And the observant eye doesn’t miss that the most intricate parts of the routine had Kim literally performing in front of Emanuel. Kim, incidentally, murdered this, then dug it up and murdered it again.
Jayme-Rae and Daniel: contemporary. Not one of Blake’s best routines, I think. Ah, well, he was due for an off night. Other than that, there wasn’t much notable about this routine other than the judges’ willingness to throw Daniel under the “you’re such a hard worker but you didn’t quite do it” bus, considering he was better out of his style than most of the other boys tonight.
Amy and Vincent: jive. TonyandMelanie ™ serve up another dull jive. Have they ever choreographed a really good jive? I am trying to think of one and am coming up short. Both Vincent and Amy were fine, performancewise: it was a perfectly decent piece of work on both their parts at performing a perfectly dull routine. The judges tonguebathed it, though, so maybe they will survive.
Probable bottom three: Amy and Vincent, Corynne and Austin, Jayme-Rae and Daniel.
Should go home: Corynne and Austin.
Will go home: Corynne and Daniel.
Related Articles
5 users responded in this post
They’re still only doing one routine? From what I’ve seen they’re all all sorts of competent. Curse those producers, holding them back. The best-received jive of T&M was Anya and Danny’s but I didn’t really think that that was terribly amazing. The choreography was really staccato, and not in a good swing-dancing staccato way, just poorly executed light and shade. Beyond that, Danny was really balletic and his feet were like Irish step-dancer feet.
I miss Natalie–I haven’t even seen this (some American network would make a modest fortune broadcasting this and the Australian version) and don’t know if I want to without Natalie.
It’s not the fault of the producers: CTV is only willing to give them two-hour slots on a limited number of occasions. This is because CTV is a deeply, deeply stupid network.
Wow, it sounds as if the dancers all hit a wall, either with dull choreo, or the limits of their abilities. I will have to wait until the vids are up of course of the international streaming embargo.
I want to go out for martinis with Rex and Mia.
I want to go out for sundaes with Karen and Mia.