SYTYCD News Roundup

The Daily Mail has a piece about Cat and the surprisingly racy photoshoot she did for Arena Magazine

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Wade Robson is the subject of the cover and a feature article in the latest Dance Magazine.

“Wade is like a chameleon,” says So You Think You Can Dance contestant Jaimie Goodwin. “You really don’t think about him having a specific style. You never know what you’re going to get from him.” Last year, Robson pushed the envelope even further on the show, working well outside his comfort zone to create ’60s-inspired protest solos to John Mayer’s “Waiting on the World to Change,” (the next day Nigel Lythgoe “apologized” in case this peace dance offended any families of soldiers) and the hauntingly mesmerizing “Hummingbird” piece. Robson received high acclaim from the show’s judges on “Hummingbird” for his uncanny ability to transform a hip hop dancer (Hok) and well-rounded dancer (Goodwin) into stunning personifications of a hummingbird and flower.

Thanks to Selly at DanceOutlook for the tip.

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Shimmy Online catches up with Ricky Palomino.

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Our blogging buddy Dave Chung ran into Mary Murphy at this week's American idol elimination show taping. She must have still been jetlagged from her trip to Aus, right?

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Behind The Scenes On Finale Day

Ricky Palomino takes us behind the scenes on finale day back in August.

Size Disparity, Culture, And Pop

Someone named Burbly commented on this piece at Theory My Culture. The comment was so interesting and thought provoking, I want to call attention to it and post the 2 videos mentioned.

Allan Frias and Melody Lacayanga, Lyrical by Keith Young (choreography reel), season 1.

I had never seen this. I have to say, though the pairing is unusual, this worked for me on an emotional level. Sometimes, imperfection creates beauty. Burbly says they ended up in the bottom 4 that week.


Ricky Palomino and Ashlee Langas, choreography by Alex DaSilva, season 3.


It's interesting to look back at the 2 dancers we got to know the least. This was an unfortunate pairing of dancers, and dancers with choreography. The close dancing (and Ashlee's heels) accentuated the height difference. Ricky still looks to me like a 12-year-old Michael Corleone dancing with somebody's big sister at a mob wedding. I think it's safe to say we never saw the best either he nor Ashlee had to offer, but at least they both have outstanding comments from Mia Michaels to take with them for their career.

Video Interview With Ashlee And Ricky

Update On Ricky's CD

Ricky Palomino has a MySpace page dedicated to his CD, Amateurly Honest, with samples and a music video. You can purchase the CD through the site, though it appears to be sold out at the moment.

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MySpace blogger Doug rants about Ricky's elimination and comes up with an interesting proposal:

I do realize that the judges get involved in the elimination for the first few weeks of the competition to try to "be fair" to the competitors. As they've said on the show, America has no idea what every member of the Top 20 can do yet, so they allow America to vote and then try to insert some "reason" into the process by eliminating one of the bottom 3 vote-getters. Their point being: "America doesn't know what a good dancer is or how good each of these dancers are in their respective genres, so we judges have to make the final decision for them." The easiest way around it so the judges NEVER have to be involved once public voting starts? Have the first night of performances after the Top 20 are chosen be solos in their respective dance styles so the audience can SEE their strengths. Have a second night of performances where they do what they already do (draw a style out of a hat and perform with a randomly chosen partner). THEN allow the public to vote. If the public is aware of what each dancer's strengths are and THEN sees them do something randomly chosen, they've been educated. They've been given the tools to make a better judgement. And then, the judges/producers can't manipulate.

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Ricky's dismissal inspires thoughts of gendered normativity and Althusser's essay on ideology in another blogger:

So, to get back to So You Think…?, the same sort of ideological reproduction is happening when we see uneven height in ballroom dance and have that deep twitch, that deeply seated sense that Ricky being shorter than Ashlee isn’t quite right. It doesn’t work. We have that sense without any education whatsoever in dance. We just feel it. Now, learning about dance forms might give us another language for that sense - and one that, in part I’d argue, is purely about an aesthetic form (partly politicized too, of course) - but the immediate feeling “that doesn’t look right” is really something different. If we reject that feeling later, well, it is still rejecting it “later.” Because ideology is so familiar to us, we don’t see ideology itself, but rather have a fairly uniform set of immediate responses to what we see and hear. Becoming aware of how intimate we are with ideology is the first step - the biggest one, really - to imagining different sorts of relation to the world.

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Our proposal: Let 'em all dance for 10 weeks, THEN let us vote.

Arizona Represents

The Arizona Republic talks to 2 Az. natives, Season 3 finalist Lauren Gottlieb, and recently eliminated Ricky Palomino.

Dancing is only one of Palomino's skills. He left Phoenix five years ago for New York to focus on a music career. So far, he has released two indie albums under the moniker Marcelino Palomino.

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You can listen to samples from one of Ricky's CDs here. There's still hope we'll find out what kind of strange he is.

Interviews With Ashlee And Ricky

BuddyTV today released exclusive interviews with this week's eliminated dancers, Ashlee Langas and Ricky Palomino

RealityWanted.net has a joint interview with Ricky and Ashlee.

Shauna Noland Has Fans

Thanks to some friends and fans of season 3 finalist Shauna Noland, we have a photo and some performance videos of her.


Videos are working now.


Shauna Noland and Kory Amaral - Vast


Ok, friends and fans of Neil Haskell, Sabra Johnson, Jimmy Arguello, Sara von Gillern, Cedric Gardner, Kameron Bink, and Ashlee Langus, let us hear from you. Oops, almost forgot Ricky Palomino. We haven't seen much of him either.

Ricky Palomino Teaching

Mia Michaels' "favorite male in the competition".