She Still Deserves To Stick Around on 'SYTYCD'

I never thought this day would come but here it is. So You Think You Can Dance's Season 11 contestant Valerie Rockey has had her first slip up on the series. On Wednesday night, the Top 10 contestants performed with the all-stars for the first time and tapper Valerie was paired with Season 5's Ade. And for their style for the week, two dancers were given Jazz choreographed by Tyce Diorio. As soon as Tyce began to explain his theme and story behind the routine, I knew something was going to go wrong during the performance.

Tyce explained that the number would be based on Valerie's character being angry with Ade's character. And that's it. That was basically the whole story behind the routine. Given that Valerie is usually such a sweet, adorable girl who has played quite a few sweet, adorable characters in most of her routines on the show so far, this seemed like it would be a challenge. It seemed even more like a challenge when Tyce's plan to get some anger out of Valerie was to make her push Ade over and over and over again. And when the performance began, it kind of fell apart from the very beginning.

As you can tell the dance didn't go over well with the judges. And while I agree with their critique that Valerie was unable to fully show her emotions, I have to disagree with Nigel and say that Tyce's choreography was... lacking. Not only was there no story to properly connect to, the choreography was choppy, was not at all cohesive and had no proper beginning, middle and end. Valerie deserved to have more explanation because she did push past her normal persona a bit, but could have done so much more if she had a little more direction.

It's really frustrating to see Tyce choreograph something that seems so half-hazard because he's also provided audiences with some brilliant routines over the years. For example, his number with Sasha and Kent from Season 8 that I like to call "The Wall Dance" was beautiful, painful and emotional.

And Tyce Diorio showed us the true potential of Season 2's Ivan with this brilliant routine danced with Allison to the Annie Lennox song "Why."

So what exactly happened in Valerie and Ade's number? Normally, I can't find anything wrong with the way Ade dances, but even his performance seemed a bit off to me on Wednesday night. His performance wasn't nearly as disjointed as Valerie's, but if Ade's slip-up isn't at least partially due to choreography, I don't know what is.

It seems like Valerie is heading towards the Bottom 2 women dancers in next Wednesday's episode, she could even go home. But here's the thing: She doesn't deserve to leave the competition just yet. She's proven to be just as good as many of the more trained female dancers in the competition, mostly because of her passion and spirit. But more than that, she's shown immense growth from her first day on the competition. Valerie has so much more in her, she just needs another save to show us her talent once again.

Images: Fox