Stomp Dance Routines

So You Think You Can Dance Season Eight: Meet the Top 20!

Then, in a departure from the usual proceedings, Ricky, Miranda, Melanie and Sasha performed a Stacey Tookey contemporary routine. (The dances and subsequent critiques were taped before a live audience.) And, yes, Natalia was in the audience cheering her sister on.

Next up was a quartet of hip-hop experts, always a good time, doing their thing with a Dave Scott routine.

Being the only ballroom dancer in the mix this year, Iveta Lukosiute (a three-time also-ran in her last eligible year of tryouts) got to  sauce it up with all-star Pasha Kovalev tonight.

The routines certainly took the edge off the usual emotional turmoil that tends to put a damper on the Top 20 selection (because there was much less time to focus on the tearful aftermath of rejection), but it did kinda sting when Jeremiah (the one whose stomp thoroughly offended Mia Michaels last year) was the last guy cut.

Ryan Ramirez, who was cut at the last second last year, happily had better luck this time around.

The joyous victory numbers also included a three-girl, one-guy Sonya Tayeh number, a two-man tap-and-Broadway routine (did we even know there was a tapper this season?), a five-person Travis Wall routine, all 10 male finalists dancing a polyglot routine by style-mixing master Christopher Scott , a fierce Sonya routine for the 10 girls, and a Top 20 Broadway routine choreographed by Tyce Diorio .

And here's the complete run-down of season eight's Top 20:

Alexander Fost , 21, Pasadena, Calif.

Event Review: Stompology « It's The Way That You Do It

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As an attendee of past events run by Groove Juice Swing, I had expected a high caliber event in terms of organization. One thing I liked is they had youtube videos to add on to the Stompology Stomp-off, a solo dance routine created by the instructors for the event. It is great because; it is an amazing promotional tool, it fosters a sense of community and camaraderie for those who learn then perform it at the event, and lastly it is a great warm up/learning experience/or review for those going to a solo jazz dance weekend.

I’ll admit though the idea of a how a solo dance weekend is conducted was unfamiliar to me. I had a nagging fear in the back of my head that it would be the crazy energetic routine from hell the entire weekend. However my apprehensions were dashed because this was not the case and there was a good variety of classes, so either days of workshops did not become monotonous.

Classes

I’ll admit I only took six classes this year, partially because I had a little too much fun at the Saturday late night. However like I mentioned above I was pleased in the fact that very few of the classes were the traditional routine classes I find at most weekends. In addition even within the routine classes the instructors focused more on the transitions in between moves, technique behind a move, and how to add in style to make the move your own instead looking like a copy cat.

My favorite class was one I didn’t originally plan to take which was Solo Blues with Evita Arce . But I stuck around for it due to partial laziness of walking to the next building over and coaxing by my one friend from Charlottesville, Virginia.

In the class we learned two short sequences of choreography and then a transition to piece them together. But one of the important points of the class for myself was how Evita illustrated through example of how details such as gaze or hand placement can drastically change the look and feeling of the movement one is trying to present.

Another unique part of the class was we were split up into six different pods and asked to perform the choreography to a song we didn’t know to whatever counts we felt were appropriate. It was a memorable experience seeing how each individual interpreted the song and in the cases of the later groups adjusted their performances based on what they saw in previous pods. The class had a very experimental/modern dance/theater feel to it but I felt gave me a lot of new ideas and concepts to digest and work on.

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