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Touring across the country might well be the closest that the Season 2 stars of So You Think You Can Dance Canada ever get to living the rockstar dream.
Just think. They’ll get to spend all of their offstage hours eating nutritious meals, exercising and getting lots of sleep. Talk about living it up!
“We are really taken care of here,” says third-place finisher Jayme Rae Dailey, hours before the “band’s” first gig in Kelowna, B.C., the other day. “We get enough sleep. We try to eat as much as we can on tour, because you’re exercising so much, and you’re spending so much time dancing that you need to be eating and staying healthy.”
Despite being the most disciplined travelling act around, Montreal contemporary dancer Dailey, 21, says she and her fellow SYTYCDC Top 10 hoofers — Amy Gardner, Austin Di lulio, Cody Connell, Emanuel Sandhu, Everett Smith, Kim Gingras, Melanie Mah, Tara-Jean Popowich and Vincent Desjardins — are a close clan that share a lot of laughs, and very tight quarters on the bus that’ll take them from B.C. to Nova Scotia through Dec. 22.
Tour stops include Edmonton on Monday, Calgary on Wednesday, Winnipeg on Friday, Sudbury on Dec. 6, Windsor on Dec. 8, London on Dec. 9, Toronto on Dec. 10, Hamilton on Dec. 12, Kingston on Dec. 13, Montreal on Dec. 15, Ottawa on Dec. 18 and Quebec City on Dec. 19.
Dailey says they had no trouble picking right back up where they left off when tour rehearsals started just two weeks after the CTV reality danceoff’s Oct. 25 finale — on which Lethbridge’s Popowich claimed the top prize.
While Dailey won’t reveal what routines are on the 18-city jaunt’s bill, she says we’ll see a few surprised in addition to repeat performances of the season’s most popular dances. Kim and Emanuel’s sexy magic box jazz-funk, and Tara-Jean and Everett’s hoppin’ house number oughta be on tap.
Also likely to have made the cut is Dailey and Smith’s red-hot mambo — one of several routines that established the voluptuous brunette as the show’s resident sexpot.
“Oh, really?” Dailey asks innocently when we point out her sexy status. “Well, thank you; that is a compliment. It’s good to be representing women in general. And if you look at it, I’m not the skinniest person. I still have curves; I’m your standard woman. You definitely don’t have to be skinny-skinny to be a dancer.”
Despite hitting the stage in some pretty racy getups that look to be straight off the Victoria’s Secret runway, Dailey admits to having insecurities. She has had to develop a knack for faking self esteem when she steps onto the stage.
“I’m not as confident as I might seem on the dancefloor, but when I go on it’s good that I forget about it,” she says. “Backstage I think it’s normal that we all stress out. I’m one of the ones that cries the most, actually. Whenever anyone asks the questions, ‘Who cries the most?’ everyone looks at me.”
Tears and all, Dailey wouldn’t trade the past few months of SYTYCDC mayhem for the world. Though she really hopes the doors it has opened for her dance career will give her a chance to see the world.
“If you asked me last year what I was going to be doing this year, I don’t think I would have said So You Think You Can Dance,” she says. “The new year is definitely going to be a new beginning to something else. I don’t know exactly what I’m going to be doing, but I hope it involves a lot of dancing, a lot of working and a lot of travelling. I want to see what’s out there. I’ve never been to Europe, so it would be nice to be able to go there.”