Tiffany and Cyrus: Lyrical Hip-Hop (Tessandra Chavez)
This one's a break-up routine, set to Beyonce's wonderful "Best Thing I Never Had." Cyrus is unavoidably stiff, and he has no sensuality to him, but the contrast of styles with Tiffany works here. She kind of throws him around, and he looks pained. Tiffs ROCKS this, actually -- it's the best thing I've seen her do. She's authoritative and fully given over to her character and hitting everything so hard.

Nigel congrats them both on never being in the bottom 2-3 all season. I understand that with Cyrus, but I admit I'm a bit baffled that's true with Tiffany. Again, not that I don't love her, but she's never been featured all that much. Maybe because Whitney was always there taking up space in the bottom, there was never much room for anyone else? Anyway, Cyrus gets more effort points for picking up choreography, and he delivers that wide-eyed face of his that's seeming a biiiit disingenuous. Rob says it was his favorite routine of the evening so far.

Ahhh, HERE'S a group routine. Good news! The bad news is that it's choreographed by Tyce, and a particularly unfocused Tyce at that. The whole thing's very concepty, but in a slight and silly way. The dancers begin dancing very classically, to classical music, and it's all very "kids playing dress-up" in attitude. You keep waiting for the other shoe to drop, but when it does, it's just the music adding some bleeps and bloops. I guess the idea is that at this point, the dancers go from classical training to their own idiosyncratic styles. Only... three of the four have very similar looking styles, with two of them ballet dancers, whose own style isn't so dissimilar from the classical moves they were doing in the first place, so there's not much effect besides Cyrus dipping into some of his animation. It's a deeply stupid piece, and awful Tyce sits in the audience with that puckery "praise me" face of his. Ugh.

Before Eliana's solo, we get a montage of her looking/acting silly from earlier in the season. We follow her journey on the show, including rare footage of the partner choosing at the beginning of the season. She very honestly says she felt like she was in the shadows the first couple weeks, with Cyrus getting all the attention, though she says none of this with any malice. She says she came alive with Alex in the "Bang Bang" routine. On stage, she delivers a very classical solo, en pointe for much of it. She's a wonder; so strong and graceful and her legs are astounding.