When viewers first found out about Season 12's new format, "Stage Vs. Street," the response was decidedly mixed. Torn between the potential repercussions and benefits of allowing more dancers without traditional, studio-trained backgrounds onto the show, for instance, my friends and I ultimately decided that this would be a good thing. Without breakers forced to foxtrot and contemporary dancers required to get down to Ludacris on a weekly basis, the street dancing would be stronger, the stage dancing would be stronger, and dancers such as Jana "Jaja" Vankova—turned away from the show several times due to her lack of classical training—would have a shot at being "America's Favorite Dancer," only made to do what she does best: street styles.
The show, however, quickly diverged from everything we expected. Last night, during the second live show of the season ("Top 20 Perform + Elimination"), we discovered that all twenty contestants would be mix-and-matched together in every style, even after street and stage dancers were only made to dance street and stage styles, respectively, during Vegas Week. This left us with three- and four-person pieces, seemingly down-graded choreography, and a whole lot of questions. Most notably, producer Nigel Lythgoe blessed us with this gem of a comment after a hip hop number by ballet dancer Jim Nowakowski and animator/Krumper Jaja:
I don't think that anyone actually will understand how I feel about this. This has been an ambition of mine for many, many years and I'm going to get very emotional because to see two completely different worlds come together and dance… it's like a battery, it's like the positive and negative sides of a battery, they come together and they make things work. And to see ballet come together with hip hop like this, and the beauty of this, it's just knocked me back.
The thing is, this is nothing new. For ten years, SYTCYD has been pairing dancers to take on the show together, often mixing stage and street dancers in the process. To highlight this, here are five of the most famous routines (in order from oldest to most recent) from the past several years of SYTYCD that Nigel is, ostensibly, forgetting, each of which feature a "street" dancer (including this season's "Team Street" captain, tWitch) getting down with a "stage" dancer in an incredible hip hop piece.
1. “Mad” — Jeanine and Phillip, Season 5
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Not to mention "Love Lockdown," their other show-stopping hip hop number...
2. “Outta Your Mind” — Alex and tWitch, Season 7
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The best part about this is Nigel's repeated comparison of Season 12's Jim to Alex...
3. “My Chick Bad” — Lauren and tWitch, Season 7
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Speaks for itself.
4. “After Party” — Amy and Fik-Shun, Season 10
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Just a reminder that both Amy and Fik-Shun proceeded to win that season, which featured two winners.
5. “Run the World (Girls)” — Jasmine and Comfort, Season 10
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From what I can tell, this is going to be one of the pieces that SYTYCD revisits as part of its special "10th Birthday" episode. Maybe Nigel will have an epiphany and realize the error of his ways? The world may never know.
This is by no means an exhaustive list, but we only can wonder what team captains Travis Wall and tWitch—whose long-term memories are, hypothetically, a bit stronger than Nigel's—think of his commentary and this season's format. Most likely, I'd imagine, they're both rolling their eyes. In simpler terms:
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