So You Think You Can Collaborate

Last week, one of my favorite television shows started its 2013 run: So You Think You Can Dance. The show is a dance competition, and people from all over the country compete to be named America’s favorite dancer.The format of the show is simple. Each week, the competitors are paired with either another competitor or an experienced dancer, and then the pair is taught one or more pieces of choreography from different choreographers. Each week that a dancer stays in the competition, they learn a new style of dance – the styles range from ballroom to hip hop, contemporary to jazz, Broadway to krump.The show is a great example of how a collaborative web can work. A collaborative web is a diffuse and informal network of people dedicated to the same tasks. The So You Think web is comprised of people committed to promoting dance in America. The members of the web are the dancers competing for the prize, the experienced dancers and choreographers who come together each week to teach the dances, and the judges.As the competition goes on, and the competitors are exposed to more partners, more choreographers and more dance styles, they grow exponentially as dancers. Ballet dancers learn to sit down into a hip hop style, which contradicts everything they’ve learned about how to carry themselves in dance. B-boys learn to dance the “pase doble” and other ballroom styles, sometimes learning choreography for the very first time in their lives.What is truly special about this show is that competitors from one season come back in later seasons as experienced dancers and, in one special case, as a choreographer. So, year after year, you get to continue to watch your favorite dancers improve and progress; and the collaborative web gets bigger and stronger.So, I strongly recommend watching So You Think You Can Dance -- If nothing else, the dancing will blow you away!