We made it through callbacks, an obscene amount of paperwork, and a lot of waiting for season 6 of America’s Best Dance Crew. But as of last week we now know that we won’t be apart of the show… this time around. We have no regrets and feel like the amount of growth we achieved during our audition process was well worthwhile. Our audition dance, affectionately named “The Hydrogen Bomb,” is now up on youtube and hopefully going viral.
On our way back to Gainesville from Houston, I wrote down the following thoughts on the whole experience. Due to confidentiality clauses, I couldn’t release the details of the whole process until now:
ABDC- the experience
The last 56 hours are all blurred together. It started on the drive to houston and ended at about 9 or 10 this morning. We made the decision to drive the 14 hours through the night into texas. We thought we were ahead of the curve because we would lose sleep on the drive and rest up the night before. Little did we know that the people running ABDC auditions this year would provide us with call-back music to create a second routine only on Friday night. With local houston teams getting a head start on choreography, we hit the road and drove through the night to arrive in Houston, Texas at about noon central time the next day.
Sleep deprived, we choreographed all day with no break only to throw out 80% of the routine and rechoreograph the routine into the late hours of the night right before the audition. Don’t let anyone tell you different, missing sleep messes with your life real hard. Your body doesn’t respond as quickly, your mind is slower, and your natural reaction to any external stimuli is cranky. Feeling slightly better after rechoreographing a better routine we tried to cram a few precious hours of sleep before the audition in the morning.
For the next half day at the audition I truly felt the pain of struggling artists in major cities. So much waiting is involved and seemingly pointless worrying and watching of others. Hours upon hours of waiting ended with our audition and invitation to call-backs. But we weren’t relieved. Being towards the end of the line for the initial audition, we had very little time before the call-backs started to polish our second routine. We only had a light breakfast in the morning and were running on monster energy drinks and leftover energy from postive judges feedbacks. We had no choice but to keep going. By night’s end we were exhausted and hungry; only finding time to snack on some pizza provided by my godparents who happened to be in the area.
Our fatigue and frustration clearly showed in our call-back routine. Despite our ugly perfromance, we were cleared through that round of auditions. We were probably just still riding the success of our first routine but it didnt matter. Our special guest judge, Napoleon from fox’s So You Think You Can Dance seemed to really take a shine to us and was probably the main reason we continued. He even told us that he might steal our music selection for his future work. After the news, we celebrated real hard, yelling and jumping up and down like mad men. You always think about other people’s reactions on tv and wonder if you would act or feel the same. Its one of those experiences where you never know how you are going to react until you are put in the same situation.
Immediately following our audition we traveled back to the place we were staying; friends in town offered their apartment gratiously, and we passed out for the night. Little was said about our awful callback performance. Instead we chose to talk about how great it was that we made it that far and accomplished everything that we wanted. From that point on, the decision of being on the show was no longer in our hands. The producers of the show would review our tapes and decide if we are marketable enough to be among America’s elite dance teams.
Waking up this morning, everything seems like a half forgotten dream with outcomes too positive to be true. Nevertheless, it happened. It was hard, it was nerve racking, and it was amazing. Whether we make the show or not, we can go back home and say we showed everyone what we were about.
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