During my recent New York visit I had the honour of meeting Sabra Johnson, winner of the US So You Think You Can Dance. With such a fun and crazy personality, packed into such a tiny body, Sabra is adorable and hilarious! Enjoying an afternoon in New York and also catching up with Kameron Bink, Top 10 Finalist, for lunch, we had a great time together. They shared many funny stories from the show and SYTYCD tour, talked about what they are doing now, and how the competition has changed the lives. Read Sabra's interview below...

How has the competition changed your life personally and professionally?

Obviously it has changed my life enormously. Going into the show I didn’t really know anyone; any dancers, choreographers, or anything like that, so now I have gotten to meet some of the best people in the business. I assume that everyone, or at least dancers in America, watched the show and now they know me. One day they may want to use me for something and if I go to auditions, which I haven’t really had the chance to do yet, this will hopefully be able to help me out.

I think more importantly we should look at what the show has done for the public as a whole, as a large majority of the population didn't know anything about dance before the show began. I think it has given dancers respect. I think it has commercialized it too, as people who in the past may not have wanted to use dancers now want to incorporate them into their productions. There is now a greater need for dancers. So I think that the show in itself has made work for dancers, instead of us making work for ourselves. It's a nice reversal.

Also, in my personal life it has put me on this pedestal in someways and I am aware that I need to make the best of it.  Speaking to the dancers from last year, the ones that used this fame early on are really doing well with traveling and teaching, getting jobs and making decent money to live without having to do other work on the side to get by. So as long as I use it right it should all work out. At 20 I couldn’t really ask for anything else. It’s insane! All of us are really lucky.

Has it turned your life upside down? Has it changed your plans or just built towards them?

Before the show, only a year and a half ago, I had decided that dance was going to be something I do forever. It wasn’t my initial plan to be a dancer, it wasn’t my original career choice, but it is now. So I guess the competition has just furthered the path I was already embarking on. I don’t think it has changed my outlook on dance. But I think I’ve been lucky to try every genre now. When we come from a studio we get to try ballet, jazz, tap  and hip hop, but it doesn’t go so far as to Latin, ballroom, krump, or anything like that. So it’s really cool to be able to try things and see them up close, get a different view, and see if it’s something I want to do. I loved dong the Latin, and ballroom was great, but it is really different to the dance that I do, so it takes up more time, but at least I’ve been able to try it and see it.

What have you been doing since the show.

A lot! So much stuff! Teaching is really the biggest thing for us right now, because for shows, on Broadway, or for company work we still have to go audition. We may know the choreographer now, and a lot of people from the show have worked with choreographers before so they know them, but I don’t personally know a lot of them, so most people aren’t going to call me to ask. I still have to audition and be the top of the line to get the part, the pressures still there. And in some ways we
feel pressure even more now because we know people
know our faces and have these high expectations of us. We still have to compete for work, and take class.

I’ve been lucky to travel, teach and choreograph and make some money. Until I start seriously auditioning again, which will be soon, I won’t really know where the competition has put me. I actually just auditioned for an off Broadway show called In The Heights that is moving onto Broadway, but I am not sure if I got in, but that’s okay because I don’t sing! They had to work with me on my singing…..and I don’t do that! LOL. Maybe another Broadway will come along where I don’t have to sing??

I want to actually end up being in a company. So for the next one to two years I want to travel and teach as much as I can and make all the money that I can, so when I get into a company and I’m not earning much

money and killing myself, I can support myself.
That’s how it’s going to be in reality.

What was it like when other dancers were sent home on the show?

At first when people were going home we were all dramatic and upset. But it’s really funny because if you think about it, we didn’t really know each other. It’s not like we were competing and wanted people to go home, we didn’t. Every week we got closer, but as the weeks started going by we got over crying. We realised that we didn’t need to cry because honestly we were all going to be back, we were going to meet again, and it was just a game. It’s the truth and it wasn’t that we didn’t like each other, but we had to get back to reality and have fun with it and forget about everything, take it day by day and remember not to take it too seriously.

What was the workload like on the show? How did you handle it and the pressure?

I had to go day by day, as I always had the early call times and I am not a morning person. 10am is too early for me! I was like, ‘Great, my rehearsal is at 7am!’ I just had to get used to it, and every day was completely different. We worked 24/7 basically; we never ever slept enough or got a good break.

It’s funny as some of us were practice crazy and others weren’t. Dominic and I practiced like dancing fiends! We were like, ‘We have to practice right now for five hours because we cannot do this chaîné!’  And it’s funny because as you practice you really don’t know what you’re getting better at because no-one is watching, you are just putting it in your mind. We were practicing all the time just for the heck of it. We practiced a lot, but some of the other dancers didn’t want to practice as they wanted to keep it fresh. They didn’t need to practice, like Danny for example, but he’s great, he can walk on the stage and do anything he wants and get away with it, if he forgets he’ll just improvise and it looks amazing! 

It was definitely hard. We walked in every Friday and were like ‘We have to learn that?'

How did you feel with all the different dance styles?

The Quick Step was really foreign to me. That was my fear. But I was really lucky, and I would hand a lot of the credit to Tommy and Melanie, as working with them I had so much fun and they are great people. I think their choreography is so much fun to do and watch and I thought the Quick Step Dance was pretty true to real Quick Step, as we only got a minute and a half to perform it in! I was really lucky to have Pasha as my partner that week, as he is a Ballroom and Latin dancer. I really got lucky with the timing of that. But when I picked it, I thought, ‘Oh my, I really don’t want to do this, it’s over!’ But I got lucky, we did it and I had so much fun. We actually did the Quick Step on tour and it was my first number on tour.

The hardest one I did though was the Cha Cha with Danny. When I was on stage I was still trying to count really hard!

Tell us about the So You Think You Can Dance Tour

The tour featured the Top 10 dancers, all the favourite dances from the show and was about 2 hours long. I can’t tell you how many different dances there were, but from Top 10 there were all of the group dances. Anya, Jesŭs, Shauna and Hok came too, so it was 14 instead of 10. The producer made sure that they all got to do at least 1 dance in each show, and Anya actually got to do half the show, because she had a lot of good numbers. It was great for them to come along with us and do their best dances. Kameron played Jimmy and he and Shauna did Ease on Down the Road and Anya and Danny got to do their foxtrot, It Had to Be You which was one of my favourite dances.

In the 2 hour long show we got to introduce all the numbers ourselves and make it personal. We’d go out and give an introduction saying what the number was, who was in it, the choreographers, and/or what the story was. We all got to do solos, which was the worst thing by the end of the tour. We were like, ‘Really, do we still have to do it?’ The producers wanted the solos to be only 30 seconds like on the show, but we wanted them to be extended to 45 seconds to give us some more dancing time. But about three weeks in we were like ‘Do we have to?’ and were glad they weren't any longer. We didn’t want to perform our solos ever again! Mine was last, so throughout the whole show I was dreading it. You had to keep up your energy and I got bored of doing my own stuff all the time.

The tour had a lot of good numbers. We got a really good response. Last year they were in theatres, and this year we were in arenas. We usually had no less than 5000 people, and we went to Canada where there was 10,000 people in the audience and it was insane. It was really cool and such an experience. There were really good times and really bad times on tour, it went up and down. We had been living together by default since the beginning so we had to learn to live together and respect each other. It was an experience that we were lucky to have because we are the only 14 that will ever have that particular experience, as last year’s group had their own completely different experience. We are the only ones that will ever really know what happened. I could never really explain what it was.

Has the competition changed the profile of dance in the community?

I think just the show being on has lifted the profile of dance in the community, as really most people who watch the show aren’t dancers. And the show really is just entertainment, as it should be.  We do it for the entertainment purpose, so I think it’s really cool that people watch the show and enjoy it. We have had people come up to us saying, ‘Watching you on the show has made me want to dance’, and they are starting to take dance classes for the first time. I think it has changed the face of dance, and has created a need for dancers in the commercial aspect, as people want to go and see Broadway and dance shows and dance on television now. There is a need for dancers. The community respects dance more and understands that it is hard and that dancers do put a lot of work into it, and beyond all, we all love doing it. It’s great for boys also, as it shows that boys can be brilliant at dancing and break stereotypes. Boys dance too, and why not?

Also, for break dancers it has been great as Dominic and Hok have it worst out of all of us, as no-one ever needs a break dancer. They don’t ever get paid, they are probably the poorest dancers ever and they live and breathe dance and never skip practice. Their whole entire goal is to win a competition and then they will get money, and that’s all. That’s all it is for break dancers as you can’t go out and audition for anything, but they have said that now it is nice as there is starting to be more work out there, plus the show has made them much more versatile and they have learnt other styles that will help them get work.

What inspires you to keep on going and work so hard at dance?

Every other dancer that I see! Seeing brilliant dancers! That’s why I keep dancing because I see them and think I have to be that good one day, I have to be amazing. Or dancers that love what they do. They may not be that great, but when they love what they do, you can see it and when they enjoy it so much, it makes me want to dance.

The dance community itself is inspiring too. What dancers have to do to dance is inspiring. They work three jobs, and barely ever get to dance enough, but they love it and it’s the only thing they want to do. Why wouldn’t you want to dance?  

What got you interested in dance originally?

I got into dance when I was living in Utah, doing nothing. We lived in Germany when I was younger and I was doing gymnastics. I stopped because I broke my arm and never got back into it and then we moved to Utah. After we moved I never got into anything for years. I wanted to do gymnastics again but there wasn’t anywhere to go. But I remember the day I realised I wanted to start dancing. I was at a cheer leading competition because I did cheer leading and at half time these little girls came out and were dancing. I thought they were so cute and I wanted to be up there dancing too. I realized I didn’t want to be a cheerleader or gymnast, I wanted to be onstage dancing. And then I got into high school and my friend was a beautiful dancer who lived and breathed dance. I ended up getting into her studio - don’t ask me why they took me, I was awful and didn’t know what anything was! They put me in their senior company, but I was in the back for everything. But it was great and I loved to do it. I actually didn’t take it very seriously for the first two years, I knew it was something I wanted to do but it wasn’t like, ‘I want to be really great some day’. I didn’t take it seriously until I moved. But I knew it was something I wanted to do and I couldn’t not be doing it.

With starting dance at a later age, what do you feel helped you to be at the amazing level you are today in such a short amount of time?

Gymnastics helped as it trained me in the aspect of being physically strong, my natural physicality is a help too, and when I was little I was really really flexible. I was dancing in Utah for two years and it was a good studio, I didn’t take it that seriously, but I learnt a lot of the technical aspects of dance which has helped too. But once I moved to Vegas I started taking it seriously. I actually taught at my school and I think that taught me a lot, as teaching is a lot of learning as well, and I actually danced with the studio and competed with them as well. I would also go everywhere else I could to take class from other teachers and then I moved to New York. Once I started doing it on my own I realised it was something I wanted to do and I danced all the time, taking every type of class I could.

What advice do you have for Australia’s Top 20 dancers?

The show really is how you take it. You have to be ready and on top of everything. If you fall behind you will never catch-up. It is so hard to keep up and everyday you’re being told you’re not as good as the next one, you’re not as pretty as the next dancer, but none of that matters because if you get sent home, so what? It’s a game, it’s for fun and it’s not the end of the world. I was lucky, I wasn’t kicked off, but that is the game and every week I was prepared to go home. You can’t have an expectation. I didn’t know what would happen, but hopefully I wouldn’t go home. Remember it’s a game, it’s not that you’re the worst, it’s just that you weren’t ‘it’ that week, and if you do make it then you have to keep going and you have to keep reminding yourself to be yourself. This was the biggest challenge for me because you start to run out of time and patience, but you just have to be yourself and not worry about anyone else. As you get further into it and there are only 3 girls, and you think they are all much better than you are it is easier to lose focus and focus on the others, instead of yourself.

Everyone says it, but really my advice would be to be yourself and be true to yourself. You can only do as well as you let yourself, and you can only be as good as you let yourself be.

See Videos of beautiful Sabra on So You Think You Can Dance and excerpts from the show...
Sabra's Final Solo
Sabra is announced SYTYCD Winner!
Sabra and Domonic's Contemporary featured above
Sabra and Danny perform the Cha Cha
Sabra and Kameron perform Contemporary

So You Think You Can Dance Australia has just began this week! Who will be Australia's First Favourite Dancer? Visit www.ten.com.au/dance for more information about the show!