Hot dog and cola in hand, seasoned dance critic Theodore Bale entered a packed stadium – full of people there not to enjoy music or sports, but dance. That was only one stop, one stadium full of fans, on a So You Think You Can Dance (SYTYCD) national tour. “How could more choreographers and artistic directors across America get a piece of this action? What are they doing, or not doing, in order to command such showering attention from an obviously eager public?” he wonders.
SYTYCD’s latest season (#19) premiered in February 2024. To the chagrin of many fans of the show, the format looked and felt quite different from that of past seasons. Those differences, and the reaction to them – in the context of the show as an indelible cultural force – may just illuminate a good deal for dance artists and their sector.
Are there things that concert dance can learn from the show in order to be more sustainable and robust? Could the show, in turn, look to concert dance in order to be even more successful – and serve as a better cultural ambassador for the art form? Especially considering COVID-induced changes to how dance is created and disseminated, we at Dance Informa thought that it’d be a great time to look more closely at these questions.
Pros and cons of dance competition on national television
To start with the positive: SYTYCD has created much broader access to, and enthusiastic interest in, dance. Millions of viewers across the country have tuned in, learned about the art form and been deeply moved by it. Because concert dance can be all too inaccessible to too many people (starting with cost), that could be many of those individuals’ only experience of the art form. That is a notable expansion of accessibility.
Lack of accessibility also impacts the concert dance industry itself, as it perpetually struggles to gain wider public interest and the funds to keep operations humming smoothly. Bale believes that SYTYCD stands in contrast: with a competitive frame, windows into creative process, use of popular music and the power of the television medium helping to make it a bonafide cultural force. “We need to look at the program closely, acknowledge its success, and glean from it anything that might be useful in order to enhance the broader prosperity of dance,” he argues.
The show has also shined a spotlight on dancers, as artists and as humans, when both the concert and commercial industry has (arguably) used them as interchangeable tools in a larger creative vision. Viewers of the show have become deeply invested in their stories, well-being and success. These dancers have even, in the show’s late 2000s heyday, become household names.
With respect to criticisms of the show, dance artist and competition MC Hannah Russell puts it within one pithy question: “Is it really reality?” Does it really reflect the totality of dance as an art form in this day and age, and how artists work and live within its sector? For example, note the solos with contestants having 30 seconds to pull out every athletic “trick” up their sleeve.
Because of the commercial television context, something presented to a mass market, the work is more about that “wow” factor than about an energetic arch — moments of stillness, highs and lows, thoughtful integration of the pedestrian and the athletic. The choreographers and dancers on the show do a fabulous job within that approach, Russell underscores – yet, let’s be honest and clear about what the approach is.
She believes that kind of energetic arch, seen within dance works longer than three minutes, requires “patience and curiosity” from audience members. Without that, there’s not much room for an exploratory process – or anything like mediocrity. Professional dancers might recognize something like this sort of atmosphere from the commercial dance sector (versus concert dance), yet there still are notable differences. For example, doing full routines or being more of a focus than the accompanying musical artist may very well not happen, like it does on the show, Russell notes.
Overall, it’s “one avenue of what work in the industry could be,” she affirms…more of a “sneak peek” and “good entry point” than a comprehensive picture. One effect of having that sneak peek, versus a fuller picture, is the impression of the industry that many young dancers get. “The excellent dancers [on the show] are the ones who can bring those gestures, moments of stillness, eye contact, in between the tricks…those are the winning dancers,” Russell affirms. We can hope that aspiring dancers recognize that.
Sydney Skybetter, Founder of the Conference for Research on Choreographic Interfaces, challenges us to put such criticisms into context with dance history. “The debate over the show mirrors those we’ve seen in dance history. For example, some said that ‘the proscenium stage will ruin dance,'” he reminds us. To objections of people eating nachos and drinking soda while watching dance, as Bale did at a SYTYCD tour stop, Skybetter notes that’s not too far from what was happening in the 18th century.
He highlights how, in dance just as in wider culture, power structures dictate norms of appropriateness. “Pay attention to those flows of power, and whose bodies and jobs are on the line,” Skybetter urges. Where is resistance to change coming from — an organization or larger audiences? What are the technologies of participation – from a proscenium (yes, that’s a technology) to livestreaming television – and how does that influence resistance to change?
Skybetter presents these as meaningful questions to consider with something like SYTYCD — how it reflects (or doesn’t reflect) dance as an art form and industry, its relationship with wider culture, and where that all goes from here.
A new season changes format and illuminates…a lot
The new season, which aired in February and March 2024 (but is also still streaming on Hulu), has a shifted format, including the number of episodes compressed from 15 to 10, four episodes for auditions, each episode centered on a “challenge” meant to reflect a specific professional context, and a good deal more “outside the studio” footage (for example, the dancers living together in a house during shooting).
While it’s not a scientific sample of audience reception, online reviews from everyday viewers (versus critics – although they also certainly had their critiques) have a general consensus of not enjoying this shifted format. Many express a view that it caused the show to lose a lot that has made it truly engaging — for example, experiencing artists’ journeys as they worked in many different styles, as well as getting pulled into their creative process – to then see the result live.
Presumably, producers of the show made these changes for a reason (or reasons) – and, let’s not forget, it’s a commercial enterprise. As such, one could ask: have market forces pulled the show farther away from what some would say dance really is, and therein alienated some former enthusiasts of the show? Could this season learn something from concert dance, as we see it out there on stages across the world?
As the judges – as well as the host Cat Deeley – made quite clear, the aim this season was to test contestants in the ways that the real industry would test them. Dance blogger Ashley Griffin questions this idea, however; as a former professional dancer, she affirms that she never had as much time to learn as little material as Season 19 contestants had. In contrast, in concert dance, the rehearsal process is sometimes months long and much more in-depth.
So, it would seem, the professional context that Season 19 demonstrates doesn’t quite hit the mark on either end. And, to the premise of the new season’s focus itself, many – if not all – of the contestants have already been booking professional jobs, Russell notes. Looking for a dancer who’s ready to do professional work, as the judges and Deeley affirmed? Many have been right in front of you, for many seasons – and it would seem strange to center this season on the search for only one.
Also notable in this latest season was contestant diversity. Audition episodes featured a drag performer, a dancer using a wheelchair and a larger dancer. All of these artists did genuinely memorable work and displayed notable talent…and viewers were left wondering about what happened to them when they disappeared without a narrative explanation, Griffin notes.
Russell believes that does reflect similar shifts to greater inclusivity in the professional dance industry – even as, unfortunately, there are always going to be spaces that aren’t truly inclusive. It seems, just like the show itself, that the dance industry is learning to fully welcome all sorts of artists. Just like within the creative process itself, we will make mistakes and then try again.
Another significant change in this season was audience voting. In past seasons, viewers could text to vote for a performer right after they performed – well, after judges shared their two cents (judges who had always had final say when it came to contestant eliminations, audience votes being non-binding, let’s also remember).
The lack of an opportunity to vote could be part of the dissatisfaction with this season from long-time viewers. Beth Fecteau, Artistic Director of Nacre Dance and creator of the choreography version of the show, So You Think You Can Choreograph, does think that voting can be a key way to engage audiences (a key reason that she brought it into her live choreography competition).
A similar dynamic may have played out with how the show was mostly pre-filmed, and (seemingly) highly edited, versus airing live – the opposite of the shows’ prior seasons. “Think about sports, and how enthusiastically people engage with that…it’s almost always live,” Fecteau notes. The ubiquity of social media only intensifies that interest in engaging in live action; people like to comment on events as they’re happening, she adds.
With dance film proliferating during and after COVID lockdowns, that is an intriguing – and perhaps challenging – dynamic for the dance sector to consider. On the other hand, short dance videos on social media go viral on the regular. Skybetter urges us to remember those power dynamics, who’s defining what’s appropriate and beneficial for the art form and why they might resist change. “‘Liveness’ is an aesthetic and ideological frame. Even the TikTokization of dance expands accessibility – and by privileging ‘liveness’ we discount that,” he argues.
What could the show be?
“We used to have regular programming of America’s most sophisticated dance artists. How did we let it slip away?” Bale asks. “It’s time that we worked toward influencing networks to feature a broader spectrum of dance programming, even if it might not win as large an audience for concert dance.”
Russell seems more skeptical that concert dance, as traditionally presented and understood, could work for a mass television audience. Perhaps some featuring and referencing of professional companies could appeal to general viewers, yet it’d have to be a careful balance. She does believe that as much authenticity as possible, with respect to the dancers as people and as artists, could be a beneficial guiding star for all involved. “If that’s what the show ‘is’, then truly showcase the dancers in their truth,” she urges.
One may wonder if the show could even look more different – to the benefit of the art form, artists and viewers. After all, the newest season had a shifted format, to the chagrin of many viewers and critics. Could there be better changes out there? There are a couple of models that could offer a good direction for such adjustments.
Russell herself has performed in one: Jacqulyn Buglisi’s Table of Silence Project, an annual dance commemoration of those we lost on 9/11/2001. It might be a singular case, all social and historical context considered – yet it is concert dance that livestreams to millions of viewers all around the world. It also offers that kind of opportunity to dancers who likely wouldn’t make it into the SYTYCD Top 20, Russell says.
Fecteau’s So You Think You Can Choreograph is another potentially instructive model. She established the program to give choreographers within the modern dance lineage a gainful platform for their work – and did hope that the pop culture-referential title would help increase buzz (and ultimately sell tickets). Fecteau shifted to a changing theme after five years, and seeing interest wane a bit.
An inventive approach has stuck around, however – such as choreographers working with a sommelier to feature a wine in a dance for a Sip, Save, or Swirl theme. “We just have to keep trying different ways to bring people in…and it’s going to be different with every organization, to honor each individual mission,” Fecteau says.
“It’s hard because students do want to see trick after trick after trick…and the draw of technology can be tough competition for concert dance. But we have to get back to what dance is. It’s not that something like So You Think You Can Dance isn’t dance, but the true nature of the art form is getting clouded,” she argues.
Concert dance has always held a tension between the pedestrian and the athletic – and perhaps it will always be a bit of an outsider to broader culture, Fecteau thinks. At the same time, she believes that we can make a difference within that dynamic. “People often like to stay in their lanes, and perhaps our job is to gently nudge them out of their comfort zones. We know how to be creative!”
By Kathryn Boland of Dance Informa.
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