So You Think You Can Dance

The top seven couples took the stage tonight on So You Think You Can Dance. There is usually a lot to talk about on performance nights, and that is especially true tonight because, for the first time all season, each couple had to perform two routines. There was nary a minute of filler in the whole two-hour broadcast.

The thing is, with 14 performances to watch, it's extraordinarily difficult to rank them all. I can hardly remember the performances in the first half of the first hour. But I'll do my darnedest. Here are my rankings for each of the 14 performances.

1. Katee Shean and Joshua Allen – Contemporary

It's not that I'm waiting for Katee and Josh to mess up, but maybe, just maybe, could we get some indication that they're really human? You'd think that if anything, a Mia Michaels contemporary routine would make the slip up, but then you would be wrong. This was an amazingly beautiful routine, full of cool tricks and beautiful movement. The judges couldn't say enough good stuff about them.


2. Chelsie Hightower and Mark Kanemura – Jazz

Chelsie and Mark can do no wrong in my eyes. Their jazz dance tonight was amazing, full of flirtatiousness that touched on something even more salacious. They had beautiful chemistry, strong technique, and they elicited the first unambiguously positive reviews from the judges tonight.


3. Kherington Payne and Twitch Boss - Contemporary

Twitchington pulled out all the stops for this contemporary routine choreographed by Mia Michaels. An inclined bed was set up on stage and the two danced on and around it, portraying lovers going through emotional anguish and turmoil. Kherington in particular convinced me of her emotion. Twitch impressed me with his beautiful technique as well as his beautifully ripped body.


4. Katee Shean and Joshua Allen – West Coast swing

This fun little number was choreographed by season 2 So You Think You Can Dance winner Benji Schwimmer and assisted by little sister Lacey Schwimmer who came in fourth place last season. Katee and Josh really showed how wonderfully versatile they are as dancers. They were able to groove to this swing number so easily and effortlessly.


5. Chelsie Hightower and Mark Kanemura – Foxtrot

I love Bon Jovi, even if he's being covered by Paul Anka. Tonight, Chelsie and Mark's second performance was a foxtrot to Paul Anka's cover. It was suave and sophisticated. It had difficult choreography, but they were nailed it once again. These two definitely better make it to the top 10 or I'll be very sad.


6. Jessica King and William Wingfield – Lyrical jazz

Wow. That's all I have to say. Jessica and Will's lyrical jazz, which was their second performance of the night, featured a prop, Will's shirt, which meant that Will danced the entire routine bare-chested. Wow. But not only that, Jessica was really great too. She is a good dancer, despite all the criticism she gets from the judges. And the choreography was just marvelous. I loved every minute of their performance.


7. Courtney Galiano and Gev Manoukian – Broadway

Courtney and Gev's Broadway routine was the last performance of the evening, and it was so cute and perky and wonderfully Broadway. They truly captured the vibe from On the Town, dancing to “New York, New York.”


8. Comfort Fedoke and Thayne Jasperson – Smooth waltz

Comfort and Thayne may have both lost their original partners last week, but they came out of the gates raring to go tonight. Their first performance of the night was an amazing Broadway routine, but this smooth waltz in the second hour was truly breathtaking. They particularly excelled at the lifts and turns.


9. Comfort Fedoke and Thayne Jasperson – Broadway

Comfort and Thayne danced a Broadway routine to “Cool” from West Side Story, which is an awesome song, and these two brought awesome chemistry to the number. However, Nigel wasn't impressed. He said that if they actually performed it on Broadway, they would have been booed off the stage. Harsh, much?


10. Kherington Payne and Twitch Boss – Paso doble

Kherington and Twitch donned silken capes for the paso doble tonight. The judges were entertained, but they all criticized Twitch for not getting into character soon enough. I thought they had a strong connection with each other, and displayed a commanding presence on stage.


11. Courtney Galiano and Gev Manoukian – Hip hop

Gev is a hip hop dancer, but tonight, he was overshadowed by Courtney in this hard-hitting hip hop routine. They were dressed in football jerseys and construction boots, and notwithstanding Nigel's comment that Courtney wasn't ghetto enough, I thought they were very convincingly hip hop. They would have been higher up on the list if Gev had been stronger.


12. Jessica King and William Wingfield – Jive

I thought that Jessica worked really hard this week on the jive. They opened the evening with a solid performance that the audience seemed to enjoy, but Mary and Nigel still seemed pretty down on Jessica, pointing out her technical flaws. Still, Jessica is making improvements, catching up to Will, but will it be enough?


13. Kourtni Lind and Matt Dorame – Mambo

Maybe it's because Kourtni and Matt are both so tall, but they didn't seem to have a lot of crispness in their mambo, their second performance of the night. It was no doubt an extremely difficult routine, but nonetheless, they seemed to lack energy and fire.


14. Kourtni Lind and Matt Dorame – Hip hop

Kourtni and Matt might be looking at another trip to the bottom three on tomorrow's So You think You Can Dance results show based on their hip hop tonight. They lacked any kind of passion and didn't even dance together for the whole routine.



-Debbie Chang, BuddyTV Staff Writer
(Image courtesy of FOX)