Those pictures are gorgeous. Wow.

SYTYCD: can someone explain to me why so many of the women "modern" dancers all have the same style (e.g. throwing themselves on the floor; jerking head; jerking legs, etc.)?

Well, contemporary and lyrical are not actually genres of dance. They are made up things created by competition dance studios. There are millions of dance competitions/workshops that keep dancers and teachers like Mia and Dan and Shane and B. Free in the lucre between choreographinig and dance gigs. NYCDA and Jump are two of the biggest, but there are tons more. Imagine the world of competitive cheerleading except dancers, and that's the Jump/NYCDA lifestyle. And for every big competition/workshop, there are hundereds of dance studios that are pipelines for the contestants in the 5 million categories and participants in the workshops by guest artists from SYTYCD. Lots of the SYTYCD kids come from that world and wind up teaching and guesting in it after the shows over - Travis, Natalie, Alison, Ivan, Kam (remember when Mia told him he had too much of the comp kid in him? And James from S1 got told the same thing by B. Free). Heck, even Danny is a former comp kid because Denise Wall's studio (Dance Energy) is huge in the competition circuit, although I think that studio does better than most at teaching real fundamentals of dance. Lots of competition studios don't. Before the kids really get the basics down, they're teaching them choreo that's all flash and little substance - basically hair flinging, sloppy triple turns and extensions that take advantage of the fact that a 12 year old is basically a non-green Gumby. And then these kids hit 18/19 and have terrible habits picked up from half knowing jazz, modern, and ballet technique (which is pretty much the mish mash commonly referred to as "contemporary" or "lyrical" dancing that we see on the show). And the sad thing is that to really do that style well, you need to be a phenomenal technical dancer. And most of these kids just aren't because they didn't spend three months just being allowed to do 1/4 turns and 1/2 turns until they really learned something about spotting and centering and pulling up and correct turnout and alignment . . . and so, we wind up with falling out of doubles or doing a triple and then falling to the floor artfully rather than nailing it and flowing that into your next move (something Danny was exceptional at, because he trained with Kirov and they don't cut corners). Sorry for the lengthy post. I have mixed feelings about "lyrical". Can you tell?

Danny was in the ABT studio company for a year or two, but didn't really talk about that on the show because he didn't want to get pigeon-holed as "the ballet guy." (According to a friend of mine who was in ABT with him.)

Yep, he was in the ABT Studio Company after going to the Kirov school in DC. And he was a featured soloist in a couple of pieces even though he never rose above corps member while with ABT, which is unheard of. Then he went to Complexions Contemporary ballet for a hot second before going on SYTYCD.

Sigh. I miss Danny.

I really don't understand the homophobia in anything dance related. Which is stereotypical in and of itself, but when I was doing dance, it was the one place where, even in my tiny town, homosexuality was considered acceptable.

Hey, did everyone else know that Next Food Network Star is back starting tomorrow at 10??

I knew it was coming back soon, but not exactly when. Thanks for the head's up!

D'oh! Thanks!

I saw that in an ad yesterday. And it's on at the same time as several other shows I watch. What is up with that?

Rewatching the latest TC: Restaurant Wars episode this afternoon, and this thought occurred to me -- isn't this the first time in four seasons that one team clearly won on the first try?