The 24-year-old Garcia’s strength in the contemporary style of dance landed her a spot last summer on the Fox reality show “So You Think You Can Dance.” Each week, 20 contestants must dance in different styles such as hip-hop, jazz, and ballroom and the number dwindles each show with voting by viewers and judges. Garcia made it through four weeks before she was kicked off for her weak performance of a fast ballroom dance called the Quickstep. Just 2 weeks earlier, her moving interpretation of a contemporary piece won her a top rating. Such is the fickle nature of “So You Think You Can Dance” viewers and judges.
“It’s very dramatic,” she said. “It’s as dramatic as it seems. Whenever I would watch reality shows and people were crying and being dramatic, I used to be like, why are they being so dramatic? But it really feels that way when you’re in it. It just feels like life or death.”
Her journey to “SYTYCD” began as a three-year-old tap dancer in San Francisco. Garcia moved to the Washington D.C. area when she was 5 years old and started to seriously study more classical forms of dance. Numerous ballet, jazz, and contemporary classes and competitions later, Garcia graduated high school and entered New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts with a major in dance. However, dancing for grades almost killed Garcia’s love for it. “My first semester in the dance department, it was tough,” Garcia said. “I never had been forced to dance before. It made me kind of not like dance a little bit.”
Luckily, Garcia was given a break from the academic life when she took a leave of absence after she was hired to join the short-lived Broadway show Hot Feet. “It was choreographed by [famous tap-dancer] Maurice Hines and so it was this new exciting thing.” Her audition for the show went well and Hines praised her dance skills. A wrong number on her resume resulted in e-mails from the casting director asking her to call back. It wasn’t until the day of the call-back that Garcia checked her e-mail and frantically called. “They were like, Karla! Maurice loved you, you booked the show,” she recollected. “That’s really rare. It was also a bit of a lesson. I was like, I’m never going to get my resume wrong again because I’m not going to be that lucky!” With her first Broadway show under her belt, Garcia got her first taste of real accomplishment in the dance world. “I was the youngest one [at] 20 in this new Broadway show. It was fun! The show wasn’t well received by the critics though and it only lasted like 3 months,” she said. “I was like, well that was a fun, quick little stint.”
After the show ended it’s limited run, Garcia finished out her three-year program at NYU and started auditioning… a lot. “I got a lot of rejection,” she said. “Nine times out of ten you’re going to get rejected, so you just have to keep going and that was part of the experience and the learning process for me.” She auditioned for the 2007 season of “So You Think You Can Dance,” but didn’t make it through that time. After traveling all over the country for different jobs, including a gig in the Florida version of the Radio City Music Christmas Spectacular and the tour of the Broadway hit “Wicked,” Garcia decided to try out for the 2009 season of “So You Think You Can Dance.”
“I thought this time around, I had been in two shows, I had been teaching, auditioning, just a lot more experiences that kind of matured me and made me ready for the experience,” Garcia said. “And I learned also that it’s a show and they’re casting. I wasn’t going to get my hopes up again.” Garcia’s mother bought her a plane ticket to Denver and booked her a room in a hotel right next to the convention hall where the newest batch of auditions for the show was taking place. Garcia said: “[My mom] spent a lot of money on that but she believed in me. She told me, ‘just do this’ and I wanted to make this worth it.” It turned out that Garcia did not let her mom down.
“I walked into the room and the judges were like ‘You made it!’ I almost ran into the door. I was so happy and it was surreal to have that opportunity.” However, the excitement quickly turned into exhaustion and frustration.
“It is a popularity contest most of the time,” she said. “I felt helpless sometimes. I was like, I don’t know what to do. It does make a difference when you see people more; you get more attached to them and you learn more about them and they get to show you what they can do. But you don’t get to control how you’re perceived. It was just so frustrating and it was hard to enjoy, but I tried.” The elimination process of the show involves viewers voting for their favorite dance couple of the week. The three couples with the least amount of votes must dance solos for the judges, who then decide on a boy and a girl to leave the show. Ultimately, Garcia felt that her lack of air-time compared to some of the other contestants contributed to America’s not voting for her. “I know I heard people thought I was boring sometimes,” she said “but it’s like, you don’t know me, you don’t know any of those people actually.”
Besides her inability to feel noticed, Garcia also dealt with the harsh criticisms of the judges and the fans. One of the comments left by scteacher212 on the SYTYCD forums said: “I personally think that Karla is the weakest of the three girls. She has not done a single dance this season that I liked so I would not be opposed to her going home.” Another user, ashylew, posted: “You do know that Karla nor Vitolio are going to make it to the top 10, right?” Criticisms such as these along with supportive fan comments crowd the SYTYCD websites about all the dancers.
“It’s hard not to look at Internet sites and see the blogs and everything. That is the worst. If I were to give advice to anybody that would be on the show, it would be do not go online and do not Google your name. You just get so down on yourself.”
A broken spirit may have been a contributing factor in her early termination from the show. But Garcia also believed that being the second oldest contestant in a sea of teenagers played a part in her downfall. “I could still hang and it was still fun but I had done my first Broadway show at 20, I had toured with Wicked, I went to college, a lot of other experiences that made me different in my mentality. I wasn’t doe-eyed. [It wasn’t like] if I don’t win this, I’m never going to dance again or if I do win this, then I’m going to be a star.”
Unlike some of her competitors, Garcia saw doing SYTYCD as merely another dance job, not necessarily as the pinnacle of her dance career. “I treated it as another gig. I mean I was excited, I was like ‘Oh, I’m on TV; this is fun!’ But it was just another gig.”
For Garcia, life after the show continues much as life did before the show. Sometimes she gets recognized on the street and putting SYTYCD on her resume certainly hasn’t hurt her any. However, it hasn’t exactly helped her a whole lot either. “I’d walk around and I’d get recognized and then I came back to New York and I got recognized a little bit. It opens a lot of doors for teaching and choreographing, Garcia said. “[But] I never felt better than anyone. I felt like I accomplished something but it’s not like I’m better than everybody or I look down on people.” All Garcia wants to do is dance. “Our bodies aren’t going to last forever so you might as well do it while you can.”
Back in the dance studio where Garcia is teaching, she finishes her choreography with legs spread and a spine-busting backbend. Karla Garcia grunts out a loud sigh and collapses to the floor. She lays there laughing as her students surround her and applaud. For a moment, it seems like she’ll never stand again. Finally, she picks herself back up and goes to turn off the music. Of course she stood up again; Karla Garcia always manages to get back up when life kicks her down.
For more information about Karla Garcia and her current projects, go to www.KarlaPunoGarcia.com!
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