So You Think You Can Dance: Joshua Allen's Tragedy Almost Kept Him From Competing
This summer,
Joshua Allen became the first hip hop contestant to win the title of America’s Favorite Dancer on FOX’s
So You Think You Can Dance. Joshua was hailed by the judges all season long for continuously performing beyond their expectations, as he was virtually an untrained dancer. He had taken some classes as a child only did a small fraction of the training his competitors did leading up to the show. For fans of the show, Joshua seemed like a natural choice to win this season: he had great partners, great routines, he performed consistently well each week, and he was very humble and likable. What fans don’t know is that, due to a family tragedy, Joshua almost didn’t make it to
So You Think You Can Dance this year.
Joshua had auditioned, made it to Vegas, and was asked to join the Top 20. Two days before he was supposed to leave for California to begin the competition, he was struck with some tragic news. His young 13-year-old cousin, Danny, had been shot and killed during an altercation over an iPod. Danny, whose nickname was “Bucket”, was supposed to go to Joshua’s house on the night he was killed to watch the episode where Joshua’s audition first aired. Bucket ended up getting into a fight instead, where he stabbed someone over an iPod and was then shot. Joshua’s family tried to keep the bad news from him, so as not to dampen his spirits, but he found out anyway.
A local news report aired the story and, to Joshua’s shock and horror, footage was shown of his aunt crying over his cousin’s body. "I wasn’t going to go on the show," Allen recently told the Star Telegram, a local newspaper in Forth Worth, Texas. "I told my mom, 'I just can’t, I just can’t’.”
Joshua’s family convinced him that going was the right thing to do, and that Bucket would have wanted him to go on with his life, so he headed to Los Angeles to compete. When he arrived, he immediately set goals for himself, kept his cousin’s memory close, and set out to win the competition.
Today, Joshua is grateful for the experience the opportunity that the show gave to him. "
So You Think You Can Dance has opened so many doors for me," he says. "I hope to go to bigger and better things." Joshua said that he is now hoping to land some movie roles but, in the future, will look to open his own dance studio.
Would you be able to be as strong as Joshua?
- Gina Scarpa, BuddyTV Staff Writer
Source: The Star-Telegram
(Image courtesy of FOX)
