Fame or Famine

Poor Chelsea Traille, put to the bottom three in the last episode and then ousted by the judges. You can see her solo below; I can see why the judges might not have liked her – in my opinion, while her technique and energy are great, there’s not a real coherence to the solo – instead of having a definable theme or beginning, middle, and end, she just sort of strung a bunch of fairly standard dance forms – flawlessly executed, mind you, but still standard – into a solo. And for the judges in the third season, that’s just not enough.

You can read some of her thoughts over at RealityWorld, where she sounds a lot like a professional athlete, thanking those who helped her get this far and vowing to continue the journey. That’s not to make light of what she says; in fact, more dancers need to hear what the show’s producer said when she called her time on the show a “humbling experience”: “he said, ‘No, it’s an experience. You didn’t really need to be humbled. It was just an experience and you’ll keep going on.’”

But I really thought she showed some insight into her rebuttal to Mary Murphy’s criticism of America’s Best Dance Crew. She very astutely points out that the two shows are totally different in design and aim; ABDC would never have ballroom dance on it, and, as she puts it, SYTYCD “doesn’t really get to explore our own creativity until we’re in the bottom.”

Perhaps there’s a lesson to be learned from that.

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