So You Think You Can Dance dashes hopes in Las Vegas

“There’s nothing fun about sitting in a chair and ripping away hopeful people’s dreams,” said So You Think You Can Dance judge Adam Shankman during a break from the show’s callback auditions Friday afternoon inside the Theatre for the Performing Arts at Planet Hollywood.

He’s right, of course. Telling sunny-faced aspiring Wade Robsons that their moves are sub par or their personalities lack pop is a literally thankless job, like the dentist, only on national TV. But, as the saying goes, someone’s got to do it, and over the past four days Shankman and fellow judges including Mia Michaels, Nigel Lythgoe and Mary Murphy, have, whittling down a roster of around 200 dancers to just the top 20 who will compete in the fifth season of the popular Fox show which debuts on June 3.

So You Thought You Could Dance?

After touring the country and seeing thousands of dancers try to cha-cha-cha or head spin their way into the Las Vegas callbacks, executive producer and judge Nigel Lythgoe said the short solo routines on display Friday afternoon were largely a disappointment.

“Mary and I have seen them all, we were the ones who put them through here, and now that they’re sort of laying their wares out and you see exactly what they’re doing, I’m disappointed with a number of them. Now that you can actually see them all together a few people aren’t as good as we thought they were.”

However, Lythgoe, who is also an executive producer of American Idol, had little of Shankman’s hesitance about trimming the weaker dancers.

“It’s too bad for them,” he said during a quick lunch break from filming, “’cause they’ll be going home just after this.”

The callback process started Friday with each dancer performing a solo in their signature style to the music of their choice. When the judges felt they had seen enough, Lythgoe would raise a hand, cutting the music and ushering the next dancer to the stage for their brief moment in the spotlight.

Over the next three days the hopefuls were put through their dancing paces, learning and performing choreography in a wide range of styles with an incredibly brief window of time to master the new and sometimes totally foreign moves.

Sarah Feldberg

If it sounds like a lot to handle, it is. It’s also a condensed version of what the dancers will experience if they’re cast on the show, in which they’ll have to work with different choreographers to perform as couples in a wide range of styles.

“Today we’ve seen an enormous amount of contemporary,” said Shankman. “We’ve seen some international ballroom. We’ve seen some hip-hop. We’ve seen something called combat jazz.

“I feel like anybody can just make up a name for something,” he added laughing.

Shankman also said he was pulling for a ballet dancer to survive the cutthroat four-day callbacks.

“In four years we’ve never had a ballerina,” he explained. “There’s an advantage for people who have some formal training, but a lot of the people who have some formal training have no personality. And we’re not going to bring people [to the show] who don’t connect with us in some way. … What the show is offering is America’s favorite dancer, not necessarily America’s best dancer.”

And that means technique alone won’t get a dancer through callbacks, let alone to the top spot on Season Five. Rather, the perfect dancer, Lythgoe explained, has some combination of “technique, no fear, adaptability to anything that’s thrown at you and a great sense of humor.”

“It’s such a tough job,” he continued. “You have to be passionate about it; you have to love it. You’re definitely going to be underpaid; you’re going to be undervalued and you’re going to be overworked.”

And sometimes, with about a half-dozen cameras following your every twist and leap, you’re also going to have to face a team of high-profile judges and dance experts knotting their brows and grimacing at your attempts to impress them.

“We always get a large bunch of small blonde cheerleading girls,” said Lythgoe. “One or two you say, ‘Save the cheerleader and bore the world.’ They’re boring. It feels like you’ve put them in a bucket and turned out little sand castles.”

Sure enough, among the dancers climbing onstage one by one for their minute or so of fame, was a compact, muscular dancer who seemed more fit for a gymnastics try out than a dancing competition. Brunette instead of blonde, her main trick was the back handspring back-tuck combination she worked into her short solo.

Lythgoe’s hand went up and her performance was done.

For the dancers who do make it through Las Vegas and into the studio for Season 5’s first episode, So You Think You Can Dance can be the turning point in a career.

“[It’s] an unmatchable boot camp of dance history and style,” Shankman said. “They are prepared to do anything, so that’s really valuable. On the other hand, except for one dancer, they come out none the richer, but very famous, which I think must be very weird. ‘Cause they’re back on the chorus line.”