movement.

Just a guess, but 98.3 per cent of the people at the Air Canada Centre Tuesday night were women screaming for the cast of So You Think You Can Dance (season 5) from the US.

Another guess? Every single person swooned in the most memorable three dances of the summer that dealt with matter of the heart - addiction, cancer and love. There is something so exquisite about dance that when seen is person, is completely different than what it is like on television. For the emotion of these dancers transcended up to our upper balcony seats, and made my heart swell at times.

However, I have to question - what is the direction that dance is going?

We have been through the competition side of dance, in which spinning as much as possible and jumping to the roof was the preferred style of what the public deemed "amazing". Now, we are going through a contemporary movement, where is seems at times, that girls throwing their hair around is the ideal.

Quoi?

Not going to lie, I loved the show last night, but where are we going to go with dance, as what I like to call, the "Art" side of the performing art, is actually that - a piece of work that is to be viewed in the same sense as a painting or a film. Then there is the commercial side which is marketable, makes people want to dance and is accessible. Can they merge? Can we bring the technique, emotion, and raw essence of movement from mother's of modern dance (which is now being warped into this contemporary/lyrical/jazzy mix, which is kinda cool and super fun to dance) Martha Graham and Isadora Duncan into the Mia Michaels realm?

Perhaps we are going through a post-modern movement of dance (no pun intended) in which the commercial and more artistic side will break again or continue to intertwine even more. Does this mean that professional ballet dancers will lose their jobs if companies can take beautifully trained ballerinas, who also can pull off hip hop without a hitch - but they might not be the ideal statuesque height? Will the new dance audience get bored of the flashier dances and demand more training, thus more ballet-like performances? Only time can tell.