As America’s Best Dance Crew prepares to kick off its nationwide tour, the show creators (not to be confused with the producer, American Idol judge Randy Jackson) Howard and Karen Schwartz tells aspiring dance crews that options are practically limitless if you want to try your hand in this field.
“What people don’t understand is that everything that has entertainment has a little dance behind it,” Howard said. “You got movies, commercials, TV, videos, video games – all these things have dance.”
As cases in point, Karen cites that while only a select number of crews get to join the tour (JabbaWockeez and Break Sk8 from Season 1, as well as Season 2 winner Super Cr3w), mere exposure courtesy of America’s Best Dance Crew should be enough to propel the crews’ dancing career to hitherto unknown areas.
Kaba Modern from Season 1 was able to expand their dance classes and travel around the country performing. Break Sk8 toured with Donna Summer, while JabbaWockeez made appearances after appearances, including a Lakers halftime show, and reportedly just landed a $5-million deal with Nike.
Few people know that it was NBC that picked up America’s Best Dance Crew first before deciding otherwise the last minute.
“We began this . . . because we just felt that the hip-hop dance community was not being exposed to a larger audience,” said Howard, who started pitching the show four years ago until Jackson stepped in.
“I thought ‘Wow, if this thing was turned loose and went a little bit that way, this could actually be amazing and people could really get into it,’ ” said Jackson. “I grew up in the ‘hood in the South in Baton Rouge, and there were crews around all the time dancing . . . so I wanted to try to expose America to that.”
-Glenn L. Diaz, BuddyTV Staff Columnist
Source: Los Angeles Times
(Image Courtesy of Team MTV)
Staff Writer, BuddyTV
