Two of the three dancers from Orange County on Fox’s ‘So You Think You Can Dance’ sailed safely into next week, but the third – 18-year-old Kherington Payne of Placentia – received the lowest number of votes and was eliminated from the Fox series on Thursday.
Katee Shean, a 20-year-old student at Chapman University in Orange, and Stephen “Twitch” Boss, a 25-year-old from Santa Ana both earned votes to avoid the bottom two.
Kherington, though, after sailing through the early rounds with Twitch as her partner, seemed not to find her comfort zone with new partner Mark Kanemura, and was sent home.
Also cut from the show was male dancer Gev Manoukian.
On the performance show Wednesday night, Katee earned the strongest praise from the judges for her performances this week.
“I don’t think I’ve seen such wonderful dancing on the show, certainly this season, but in the past as well,” judge Nigel Lythgoe told Katee and her new partner Will Wingfield after their performance of a pas des deux.
Twitch earned mixed reviews for his two numbers with partner Comfort Fedoke.
“It was choppy, it was clunky…it didn’t really work,” said judge Mary Murphy after their smooth waltz number.
But a hip-hop routine brought them back into the judges’ good graces.
“Um, it was kinda buck,” said judge L’il C. “Buck is when internal artistry meets physical expression. That’s what it is.”
Kherington, 18, who just graduated high school in Placentia, seemed to struggle, and the judges – and viewers at home – noticed.
“Kherington, you have to trust him enough to let him lead you,” Lythgoe said, noting how tentative she seemed on some of her two-step moves. “And it was probably because you didn’t trust that he was going to be there for you.”
On Thursday, after a final solo performance but before the results were announced, the judges were much kinder to Kherington.
Murphy told her that after the Las Vegas round of auditions she’d pegged Kherington in the bottom of the Top 20, only to see her rise to frontrunner status over the next few weeks, making her low vote totals this week a shock.
Lythgoe, meanwhile, told Kherington she had “film star looks” and “a hell of a future.”
Still, in the end, that didn’t translate into enough votes to keep her on the show.
Contact the writer: 714-796-7787 or plarsen@ocregister.com
