The dance styles of So You Think You Can Dance, explained

Understanding So You Think You Can Dance

The eleventh season of the beloved dancing reality show So You Think You Can Dance premiered May 28, 2014, and as always, SYTYCD is showcasing dancers from every major genre of dance, including contemporary, jazz, ballet, hip hop, tap, and ballroom. These styles of dance are randomly assigned to contestants, which makes things tricky since each contestant is required to dance outside of his or her comfort zone (i.e. in a style that they might not be well trained in).

While most of the styles are fairly well known, the details can be somewhat obscure at times. What makes a dance jazz and not hip hop? What sets contemporary apart? With that in mind, here’s a guide for understanding some of the prominently featured dance styles on the show.

What is ballet?

By: Julia Jester

Classical ballet is the foundation from which nearly all dance styles have developed. It requires strong technique, athleticism, and grace.

Originating in the Italian Renaissance courts of the 15th century, ballet de cour began as a casual pastime before Catherine de Medici, an ardent patron of the arts in Florence, helped develop it into a cohesive form performance complete with themes, geometric choreography, and theatrical elements. She then funded the art form in the French court, where King Louis XIV, a ballet dancer himself, elevated ballet to a professional endeavor requiring rigorous training. Louis XIV’s personal teacher Pierre Beauchamps is credited for standardizing the five fundamental positions of the feet through which all balletic movements move.

In the mid-1700s, French ballet master Jean Georges Noverre diverged from the standard opera ballet to create ballet d’action, emphasizing the storytelling element of the form. Romantic ballets emerged in the 19th century, at which time dancing on the tips of toes, called en pointe, became the standard for ballerinas. During this period, ballet became overwhelmingly popular in Russia, where both choreographers and composers collaborated to create some of the world’s most enduring ballets — for example, The Nutcracker, The Sleeping Beauty, and Swan Lake. As movement sequences became more difficult, the original romantic tutu consisting of a calf-length tulle skirt was replaced by a shorter, stiffer tutu, which revealed the intricate footwork and precise lines of the dancers.

Ballet was revolutionized in the 20th-century, when the Russian-born choreographer George Balanchine immigrated to America and founded the New York City Ballet. There, Balanchine transformed the art form by creating neo-classical ballet, which aimed for the purity of expression by eliminating distracting theatrical elements. He also introduced the contemporary plotless ballet, in which movement rather than storyline is designed to convey emotion.

American Ballet Theatre artistic director Mikhail Baryshnikov, modern choreographer Twyla Tharp, and Joffrey Ballet founder Robert Joffrey also greatly contributed to American ballet. Today, both classical and contemporary ballet companies, such as The Washington Ballet and Complexions Contemporary Ballet, respectively, continue to develop the style.

Some identifying elements of ballet include:

• Five positions: the basic positions of the feet and arms through which most ballet skills move through

• Well-maintained posture, extension, and precision

• Body alignment: the rotation of the legs from the hip so that the feet are facing outward (known as “turnout”), correctly placed arms, and centered upper-body

• Complicated patterns of dance moves, challenging steps such as leaps and turns

• Graceful athleticism: muscular, toned physique combined with elegant, fluid motions

Here’s an example of a popular form of ballet known as pas de deux — “step of two” — choreographed by Thordal Christiensen and performed by SYTYCD contestants Melissa Sandvig and Ade Obayomi.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yctEDuPhlyA

What is jazz dance?

By: Brandon Ambrosino

Jazz dance is an umbrella term encompassing several different styles of dance that became popular in the early 20th-century. Though jazz dance has mixed roots extending back through both African and European traditions, it’s a uniquely American creation, which developed simultaneously with jazz music in New Orleans. Unlike in other parts of the United States, slaves in New Orleans were allowed to retain and practice elements of their African heritage, and on Sundays, would gather in the Place des Nègres — later called Congo Square — to sing and dance.

Eventually, this kind of social song and dance became popularized beyond the African American communities, especially as Southern blacks migrated to Northern cities during the Great Migration. Social dances like the Charleston and the Jitterbug caught on. In the 1940s, the improvised, social aspect of jazz dance began to be replaced with intricate choreography as more dancers with training in ballet and Modern took up the dance form, especially on Broadway stages. This emerging style of technical jazz became codified in the movement of Jack Cole, Jerome Robbins, Gwen Verdon, and Bob Fosse.

Today, jazz dance continues to evolve and blend with other dance styles — for example, street jazz and theatre dance. However, true to its roots, jazz dance continues to hearken back to the ethnic eclecticism that birthed it.

Some recent and contemporary pioneers of jazz dance are Katherine Dunham, Michael Jackson, Luigi Faccuito, and Michael Bennett. Noted jazz choreographers on SYTYCD include Wade Robson, Mandy Moore, and Sonya Tayeh.

Some identifying elements of jazz dance include:

• Isolations: a dancer isolates one specific part of her body, such as her rib cage or wrist
• Grounded movement: dancers keep a low center of gravity, and often bend their knees
• Syncopation: accenting an offbeat or note of the musical accompaniment that surprises the audience
• Contractions: motivated by her breath, a dancer will make a C-shape with her core
• Sensuality: there is a sexiness in jazz dance that is lacking in more traditional styles

Here’s an example from SYTYCD, featuring dancers Alexis Juliano and Nico Greetham. The choreography is by Spencer Liff.

What is tap dance?

By: Brandon Ambrosino

Like jazz, tap dance was born from a fusion of European and West African cultures. In the mid-1600s, slaves in the Southern United States began to imitate the jigs and social dances of the Irish and Scottish, combining them with the West African Juba dance. The Juba, which involves slapping of the arms, legs, chest, and face, grew in popularity after the Negro Act of 1740 made it illegal for slaves to play drums — slaveowners were worried that blacks were using drumming to communicate in code with each other with the hopes of planning an uprising. Percussing their bodies, then, was a way for slaves to supply the rhythms that otherwise would have been lost due to the drumming ban.

In the middle of the 19th-century, this evolving style of dance made its way onto the stage with the rise of minstrel shows, which featured white performers, in blackface, caricaturing the song and dance of slaves. Though these shows purported to feature “authentic” black culture, they were conceived and performed by mostly white artists. The exception to this rule was William Henry Lane, a free African American. Lane’s dance skills shot him to fame — his name received top billing over white performers, and Charles Dickens even wrote about him in his travel book American Notes. Lane came to be known as “Master Juba,” and is thought to be the most important dancer of the 19th-century, and the inventor of American tap dance.

Tap dance continued to evolve through the end of the century, and was performed either in hard-soled wooden shoes (Buck and Wing) or soft-soled leather shoes (Soft Shoe). In the 1920s, metal taps were added to dancers’ shoes, which helped to further differentiate the emerging style of dance from its predecessors. With the rise of the musicals on stage and screen, tap dance became a part of America’s cultural fabric. Its popularity saw a brief decline due to the rise of rock-and-roll in the 1950s, but thirty years later, the genre saw a renewed interest among dancers, especially among black dancers who looked up to hoofers like Gregory Hines, Sammy Davis Jr., and Savion Glover.

Today, tap dance is broadly divided into two categories: rhythm tap and theatre tap. Rhythm tap focuses more on musicality and improvisation. Theatre tap (also called Broadway or Show Tap) is a much more presentational style of dance, and concerns itself with the aesthetics of the entire dancing body.

Some foundational tap vocabulary includes:

• Time steps: a dancer keeps time, or the musical beat, with her feet
• isolations: a dancer isolates one part of her foot (heel, toe, ball) to make a sound
• brush: one foot remains stationary, the other strikes the ground moving forward or backwards
• shuffle: the combination of two or more brushes
• ball change: a two-count move that changes the body’s weight from one foot to the other
• flap (pronounced FUH-lap): a quick brush followed by a step

Of course, in performance or practice, many of these foundational moves are combined into more advanced footwork and rhythm.

Here’s a beautiful tap dance from Season 10 featuring Aaron Turner and Melinda Sullivan (from Season 7). The choreography is by Anthony Morigerato.

What is Broadway dance?

By: Brandon Ambrosino

Broadway dance developed alongside jazz dance. When jazz found its way from New Orleans to New York in the 1920s, stage directors began to incorporate it into their shows as momentary bits of spectacle scattered throughout loosely-framed narratives. However, once directors and choreographers started using dance to advance their plotlines instead, the choreography became more intricate and the dancers more trained. There are examples of this type of dance throughout the 1930s — Anything Goes, for instance — but it wasn’t until the 40s that it really took off.