Greetings dance fans! For those joining us from PureDWTS & PureDerekHough, glad to have you on this journey with us, and thank you for your continued patronage 🙂 For those new to our little corner of the internet, welcome and thanks for dropping in! Heidi, Vogue, John, & myself were all very interested when we heard about World of Dance, and hopefully we can make lightening strike for a 3rd time and provide you guys with the same comprehensive coverage that we do at PDWTS & PDH, and have a good time while we’re at it!
Since the show is completely new and we don’t have a super-clear picture of how it’s going to work yet, please bear with us as we work through the best way for us to bring you coverage – and by all means, let us know if there’s something you would like to see, or an idea for a post that you might have. We’re kinda making this up as we go along, and feedback would be appreciated 🙂
In light of our knowledge of the show so far being rather limited, I thought it best to start off with what we DO know – here is a list of facts/tidbits that we have so far, as well as some of our thoughts on it. I will copy this and add to it for subsequent updates, as more information comes to light.
1.) Jennifer Lopez will serve as Executive Producer, and her production company, Nuyorican, is at the helm. Dance Lifestyle brand World of Dance is also involved. And this isn’t the first time Jennifer has been in charge of a dance-ceAntered reality/competition show – she produced & starred in 2007’s DanceLife on MTV (which gave us a glimpse of a pre-Footloose Kenny Wormald) and 2012’s ¡Q’Viva! The Chosen on FOX (which was a loose Latin American version of America’s Got Talent, where she & Marc Anthony searched Latin America for dancers, acrobats, and musicians for a Vegas show). World of Dance (or WOD) has become an international, urban-themed dance competition since its founding in 2008 – more at the WOD website.
2.) Jennifer will be joined at the judges’ table by Derek Hough & Ne-Yo. Profiles of the three judges and their dance backgrounds coming later on in the week…stay tuned! And if you haven’t already, check out Derek’s interview on Access Hollywood Live where he talks about WOD.
3.) Contestants will be competing in one of three divisions: Junior, Upper, & Team. Per the World of Dance Casting website, the criterion for each division are as follows: Junior – anywhere from solo up to 20 performers, all between the ages of 8-16; Upper – solo up to four members, ages 17 and over; Team – anywhere from five to 20 performers, all over the age of 17.
4.) The judging criterion, developed by WOD, takes into account Routine, Execution, Presentation, & Crowd Appeal. Per the NBC World of Dance website, each act will be scored on those four categories – which makes me wonder if each judge is going to give four scores, and then the three judges’ scores from each category will get averaged together, and then somehow the averaged scores from each of the 4 categories will get cobbled together to get a total score…? I’m not sure and I’m totally guessing, but I actually really like this format – it addresses the struggle Heidi & I often have with DWTS, where a couple might get a perfect score for a routine that isn’t all that impressive in terms of choreographic difficulty. It also separates out crowd appeal as a separate score, so unlike the DWTS judges (who seem easily swayed by an emotional or crowd-pleasing routine that might not actually be all that good, technically-speaking – or even the SYTYCD judges, who don’t even give scores but also seem more likely to get “caught up” in an emotional routine), the WOD judges are more likely to be realistic about how good a routine really is – a dance could potentially get high marks in presentation & crowd appeal, but ultimately fall short in total score because a routine was poorly executed or choreographed. This may actually be one of the better thought-out scoring systems we’ve seen among dance-centered reality tv shows in recent years…
ETA: Here is a little bit more on the scoring from Bustle.com:
The scoring system is also more specific than what’s used on similar TV shows. For every routine, the judges get 20 points each to assign in each of these five categories: performance, technique, choreography, creativity, and presentation. In order to move to the next round, a dancer or team must average 80 points between their three scores. And, the scores are determined solely by the judges — there’s no audience input.
5.) The grand prize is a cool $1 million. And the reason the scoring system is so detailed may have something to do with the prize being unusually large – aside from America’s Got Talent (who only offered the $1 million prize from season 3 onward, and has a much larger contestant pool from multiple disciplines), I don’t think any of the dance-centric reality competition shows have offered a prize even close to this one – the DWTS prize has been estimated to be somewhere in the neighborhood of a few hundred-thousand, and I think the SYTYCD purse topped out at $250K. The prize for Paula Abdul’s short-lived 2011 dance reality show Live to Dance was allegedly $500K, and I think the America’s Best Dance Crew prize was a relatively paltry $100K. So given that there’s an unusually large prize at stake, I think the judges are going to be quite a bit pickier and more critical than we might be used to – but the upside is that we’re only going to be seeing really, really good dancing. Higher prize = more entrants = more need for scrutiny = better overall quality of dance.
6.) The show is set to premiere sometime in January or February, and will be 10 episodes long. According to the casting website, the deadline for the video submissions was August 26, and those who were lucky enough to get a callback audition in NY, LA, Chicago, or Atlanta were to expect their callback to happen sometime in September. Thanks to our buddy Kristyn Burtt, we also know that those who made it through the callback were told to expect to tape the live shows in January or February. While we don’t have a set premiere date yet, I would guess it would be more likely to be in late January, when most of the regular-season shows are still on winter hiatus and won’t pose as much of a threat to a new show looking to get its sea legs and establish a following. By the time the regular season shows start back up in mid-February, WOD will hopefully have an established viewership that will stick with them for the remainder of the season.
7.) Acts will face-off in duels against other acts in their division, until only one act from each of the three categories remains to compete for the grand prize. Kinda self-explanatory, and from the casting website.
Other random thoughts? I think this show has the potential to be really, really good – J. Lo’s no slouch, and doesn’t slap her brand on just anything. If she’s involved, it’s going to be a high-quality production – and I think grabbing Derek as a judge was a very, very shrewd move, not only because he’s at the top of his game in the dance world right now, but because bogarting the prize stallion of a popular dance show on another network is bound to draw viewers from DWTS…in much the same way the DWTS hired former SYTYCD contestants as pros. I also feel like the timing is right for a show like this – with DWTS becoming increasingly more manipulated, and SYTYCD’s ratings continuing to plummet, and AGT tending to favor singers & novelty acts over dancers, I think there’s a definite niche that needs to be filled for a dance competition show for dancers of all ages and a high degree of talent. Needless to say – I’m pumped about this one 🙂
So what are your initial thoughts about the show? Do you think it will do well? What are you hoping to see? Let’s get this party started!!! 😎
