kitcloudkicker

I think Julianne got the most screen time of all of them. She’s in the quiddich scene and then later next to the Weasley twins in the Great Hall. She posted screenshots a while back for the 20th anniversary

The troupe got promo shots this year, and he wasn’t included (announced troupe was Artur, Hayley, Britt, Morgan, Vlad.) There’s a chance he’s a late addition, though he’s also worked on the show on a week to week basis before. They’re doing that a lot lately, filling in with extra dancers beyond troupe, on an as needed basis. One of the tappers looked to be one of those who seems to turn up on a few episodes a season (Nick Baga?) I don’t think they are official troupe.

Yep. They’re like the Yankees of football (they call themselves “America’s Team”) https://www.forbes.com/sites/kurtbadenhausen/2017/09/18/the-dallas-cowboys-head-the-nfls-most-valuable-teams-at-4-8-billion/#4f27a494243f

Hayley (future Hough)

This is maybe slightly off topic, but the CEO of Twitter, Jack Dorsey, is somehow slowly morphing into Artem. Or they are converging upon the same face, it’s kinda freaking me out. Dancing with the doppelgängers.

It hasn’t yet. That’s why the thread about it is in spoiler tags.

I mean, if I were a showrunner looking at most of my "star" pros aging out of the show or going on to work on other projects, I'd make the call to try to create some new buzz by getting my new pros some partners with a fighting chance to stick around for a while. It'd be nice to see Brandon (and/or Alan) step up and bring some energy in the way of a Mark, the male pro lineup has gotten pretty lackluster in the past few seasons. ("The answer is, 'Artem, Gleb, and Fetch.'" *ringing in* "What is, 'Things that are never going to happen?'")

I would say that’s NOT the whole point of troupe, and my argument in support of that is those hiring decisions. They’re much more self serving than creating a training crew, they want troupe who can fill the purpose of troupe now, not be future anything. The point of troupe is to be able to rapidly flex into whatever dance they need them to, at short notice, with little time to learn the dance, and be able to quickly make it through costume changes and hit their marks. To that end they have clearly prioritized hiring cross-trained industry dancers who have worked jobs like that. If they end up being good future pros I’d guess they see that as a bonus, and not the point. (I don’t know what part of that they didn’t like Brittany for, I thought she was great.) People like Hayley and Britt are sort of interesting though, because they both immediately dove into intensive ballroom training (Hayley’s been taking lessons from Shirley Ballas for years) and they’re coming up around three years on the show — will they ever get to say they’re “trained”? How trained do they have to be to be “trained ballroom dancers?” I’m not an expert but I can see they’ve improved leaps and bounds, especially when compared to Morgan who is newer to everything. Just something I wonder, as when you get a celebrity like Heather she gets, “all that training is transferrable with a little work,” and with these cross trained troup it seems like they’ll never be seen as ballroom trained, even after years of it.

If you click through to this Twitter thread ☝?the replies contain the best summary I’ve seen. I know like, none of them, but I do get the context of some of them (Stevie Wonder’s son, Scottie Pippen’s daughter)

I think some of them have been doing “decoy shots” - posting old pictures from hair and makeup during show days to try and throw people off, but yeah, for the most part it seems a bit sloppy. The subset of fans that pay close attention is probably such a small percentage of the viewing audience they don’t care, is what I would guess? I’ve heard some of the elimination order, though all of it is unverified rumors, so I have no idea if it’s right. I know we don’t have to do spoilers in a spoiler thread, but I’ll do it in case

Mini pros & mentors First taping was this weekend and apparently had a double elimination. I haven’t come across any spoilers but my wild guess is that one of them was Jenna, her niece, and Tripp based mostly on a sappy, “you’re the most amazing” post Val directed at her almost immediately after the show was supposed to have taped. Felt like a cheer up message. (Also, political family aside, I don’t think Tripp would be able to hang with some of these cross trained Disney kids.) We’ll see I guess! I could be off base.

Studio audience gets a vote, but yeah, nothing live. Allegedly a labor laws issue - hard to orchestrate a live show when your whole cast can’t work more than 4 hrs a day. Might be part of why Adams’s there actually. Him + studio audience make up the 50% of the vote that just goes off performance and gut feelings. (The other part likely being charisma & his ability to generate quippy sound bites.)

Nope. Her mentee is her niece, but is partnered with Tripp Palin. This isn't a spoiler, just a hunch based on some vague supportive social media activity sent Jenna's way, but I think they might have been eliminated in the first taping. (It's taping now, but doesn't air until Oct.)

I think that's just going to happen with any show like this. The dance world is small to begin with, and then you filter them through criteria of: have enough dance experience to be considered a "pro" between the ages of 10-13 (slightly older for the boys, likely because of hight issues) with parents/guardians willing to relocate them to LA for the summer for a television show I think you naturally will end up with a pool full of kids who are "on the circuit," for lack of a better word, for other television shows. (For better or worse.) Here's the full list of mini pros (source) (I don't know any of them besides JT and Jake, and then knowing of Lindsey's sister & Jenna's niece.) I'm not going to be making this appointment television. (Though I did get sucked into clips of The Voice Kids UK on youtube the other day and it was the cutest damn thing I'd ever seen, so maybe I should never say never.) The couple thoughts I have about this version kinda boil down to They went real young with the casting, which makes me hope that DWTS fans go a bit easy on them, because they can be cruel and these are kid kids. Even as much as I want to eyeroll at some of the "celeb" casting rumors (Bristol Palin's son? Bleh), I find myself wanting to take it more easy on them? I'm curious to see how the actual pros do as mentors and what that will mean in the construct of the format they set up. Hayley and Brandon from troupe have gotten bumped up to mentors on this version, which seems like an indication they're on the track to potentially get a pro spot in the future, so it might be interesting to see them in a potentially bigger role.

Rudy was also on a Move tour with the Houghs, and choreographed on one of Derek’s “personal project” YouTube videos he put out (last year, I think?) I missed the intro of his group, so I don’t know if that was mentioned. The connecting thread through all them is NappyTabs, who have been behind the Move Tours, WOD, and the JLo Vegas show — so if there’s a lesson from SYTYCD it seems to be be nice to and keep in touch with your choreographers, so they remember you when they start casting all the things.

For me, the tricks distinguish themselves as "dance" when they're executed with musicality and precision. Like if someone's doing something that's very simple, but done with musicality and control, I think that'd be excellent dance. Same if someone's doing some sort of crazy contortion -- it's not the contortion itself but the way you execute it that can make it dance. That said, I think she did that better last year, and she was more "acro-routine" in this performance. Saaaaame! The only tap I like is like, Fred Astaire/Gene Kelly tap. I get that you're supposed to "listen to it and not watch it" but if I just wanted to listen to percussion I'd just listen to drums, and I watch dance to watch it. And modern tappers tend to just look like people continuously almost falling over. I think I read the DWTS Jr. age cutoff was around 13, and Ruby is "too old." They casted for "kids" and not "teens."

Yes. There’s a full list of competitors out there. Putting this in spoilers in case people don’t want to know but there’s more repeats Its funny, I’ve always 100% followed this show on YouTube. They post all the dances, it takes like, 15 mins to watch them all. (If that?) Super efficient, I have no idea what they do with the rest of the time, but it sorta doesn’t matter for me?

Kristyn Burtt has written a fair amount on this. It boils down to: it's not really the pro's fault, it's a problem in how the industry is set up and how DWTS works. https://www.dancenetwork.tv/Catalog/Post/261/its-time-to-reframe-the-choreography-question-on-dancing-with-the-stars Usually, it seems like it works like this. 1. Pros/dancers like to help each other out. Creatively, it gives you new ideas, and it's nice to collaborate with people you trust to keep you fresh, bounce things off of each other. It's a collaborative medium, people LIKE to work this way. Witney and Alan Salazar (the one who helped choreograph for Alphonso) have a good working relationship like this - they are friends, he taught her for a long time, he likes to help her (and Lindsey, and Mark, and Val, among others) out with choreography or co-choreography. 2. Emmy rules state that unless this collaboration is PAID FOR BY THE SHOW, you can't put their name on the nomination. 3. DWTS doesn't like to pay outside choreographers for the weekly dances apparently - putting pros (and outside choreographers) that want to collaborate, in a bind. This is what happened to Witney and Alan - she tried to get him a credit, it wasn't allowed. So it's an industry-wide problem, everyone seems to be doing the best they can. Alan was interviewed on Kristyn's show, and he's well aware of the limitations, as much as he was bummed to miss out on an Emmy nom. There is also, allegedly, work going on behind the scenes for dancers and choreographers to unionize, to start to argue for more rights. For now, what you'll see usually is shoutouts on Instagram if you want to hunt down full credits. Alan Salazar tends to post all the dances he helps with, that's where Jenna thanked Talia and Talia posted about helping. It seems to be all they can do at the moment.

It reminded me of it last night, but watching this dance again yes, definitely, completely inspired by this. And such an odd choice, because why do a k-pop influenced thing when your song is Dominican/Latin?? Like, all the pieces didn’t even really fit together. I think Jenna shows some potential promise as a choreographer, but this just came off as a weird copy of someone else’s style. And the Jazz was fine (it was at least actual jazz) but no acting out the words of the song plz, it makes me uncomfortable it’s so awkward. A very weird finale. Oh. And Josh’s dance reminded me of a Very Fancy Monday Night Football intro. Like when they get Faith Hill or Carrie Underwood or Nickleback to come sing a song about football over a bunch of flashing lights and clips of football? It was basically that but more dancing.

It reminded me more of this one

I think the winner? There's no extra show next week so they've gotta crown a winner by the end somehow. Last nights votes + next week's scores would be my guess.

Jana and Laurie did a whole birdcage dance with that set. Derek & Bindi did a foxtrot with the same costumes and set as Chris and Witney. Sharnas contemporary was reminiscent of Bindi’s as well. Rumors of budget cuts seem to be true.

I mean, lets face it, the show is struggling with this short season. Having Mirai in the finale would be boring. Having Tonya in the finale makes people say, "Can you believe Mirai didn't make the finale?" "I hate/love that Tonya is there - what's that, you have the opposite opinion?? Lets fight online and give #DWTS a chance to trend!" It's all about 'dem eyeballs. I don't think it's working. I think they made a misstep in making the short season have the exact same format as a regular season, it emphasizes it's shortness. If all they were going to get from ABC was 4 episodes or nothing, I'm starting to think they should have really shaken up the format to make it seem like a "special event." Make the scores & voting be cumulative across the 4 episodes. Or have a different group of people face off in each of the first 3 episodes, spend more time with them so you get to know them better, and have the voting determine a winner of each episode, making them the final 3 that face off in the finale. (American Ninja Warrior-ish) It feels like they could have done something to make it feel like a "DWTS Special Event!!!" instead of a "DWTS Sad Season Because Idol (womp womp)" I'm glad Adam's going to win though, I like 'im. I know it's from his skating, but man, he's got beautifully expressive arms and hands.

Someone used DWTS as part of a study to prove that the longer someone judges something, the more positive their reviews get. https://news.virginia.edu/content/amazon-dancing-stars-judges-ratings-rise-over-time?amp&__twitter_impression=true

Meryl, Nastia & Von will be back this week to "mentor" https://www.etonline.com/dancing-with-the-stars-meryl-davis-nastia-liukin-von-miller-returning-to-ballroom-as-mentors-102037 Also someone from production posted a picture that accidentally reveals the 6 potential final dances, freestyles & songs if you zoom into the background (spoilers ahoy)