MONDO EXTRAS

Daniel: When dancers are doing your routines, and they're getting criticized by the judges, how much responsibility, as a choreographer, do you feel?

Sparks: Oh my god. It's, I'll say it's fifty-fifty. I honestly say that, because a lot of times, when we give them choreography, a lot of times we're giving them choreography that fits the two. Sometimes you have a better hip-hop dancer, and a better jazz dancer, dancing together, so I cater more to the hip-hop dancer, and then I water it down to fit the one that doesn't do hip-hop, you know what I mean? So I do -- that's my job, to make them look good, but after that it's on them to practice and train and make it the best that they can, because I don't care who you are: if you can walk, and you have a little rhythm, you can make almost any routine look good. So when they mess up, or when they don't give a hundred percent, or they don't come across well, that's on them, you know what I mean? But the idea of the choreography, you know, that's on us. We usually give them a good piece.

Daniel:There did come a point in the season where Nigel said, "Okay, now I want the choreographers to give us the best they got, and it's going to be up to the dancers to rise to that level"?

Sparks: Right. Exactly. Exactly. And what's crazy about that is, I did that, and I still got in trouble, because I was giving them stuff that they really couldn't do, but I was trying to make them go to another level, and it came across where it looked like they didn't know what they were doing. They did not do it well. So I still had to water it down a little bit more to adjust to their abilities.