ARC AT 60: ‘OUR GOAL ... BE GREATER TOGETHER’
And this Dreyfoos grad is proving it on Fox’s dance competition reality show.
The name of the show is “So You Think You Can Dance,” but Darius Hickman doesn’t just think he can dance — he knows it. He breathes it. And as he continues to advance in Fox’s dancebased reality competition with his exciting flexibility, the West Palm Beach native is positive that his life depends on it.
“I have to dance,” says the 19-year-old Dreyfoos School of the Arts graduate, who is a current contestant on the show, seen on Mondays at 8 p.m. “This is what saved my life, saved me from falling into depression. I have to dance in order to be sane again.”
Hickman’s journey began when he was part of an untrained hiphop crew. Now an aspiring collegiate ballet dancer and a new TV star with at least one celebrity fan, Hickman’s journey is a study in discipline, resolve and a pledge he made after the death of the aunt who raised him for a time.
“I never thought about dancing professionally until after she died,” he says of La’tia Johnson, who took him in when his mother was fighting addiction. While living with Johnson, he watched her endure an incredibly abusive relationship, eventually gathering the strength to escape it before her cancer diagnosis.
“She’s the one who introduced me to all of these dances and influences. I have to do this for her,” he says.
For that scared little boy watching his mother, Monica Hickman, battle addiction, and then witnessing his aunt “struggle and almost die,” dance gave him “a sense of control,” he says. “It taught me that things weren’t going to magically improve. I had to put the work in. I realized I have the power to do something, to get the outcome I want. That was a whole new world for me.”
This isn’t the first time the dancer, currently enrolled at Indiana’s Butler University, has appeared on “SYTYCD.”
Last season, he made it as far as the first preliminary Dance Academy level. He can’t say how long he lasts on the show, but he seems fairly optimistic, having made it from a field of hundreds.
While Hickman’s future on “SYTYCD” is a temporary mystery, at least for the audience, he’s very clear on how his past brought him to this point. Although he’d spent his youth “as a B-boy” hiphop dancer, he didn’t start his formal training until he “auditioned on a whim” for admittance to Bak Middle School of the Arts. The scene sounds like something straight out of a feel-good dance movie, walking in without “knowing any of the technical terms. I didn’t have the proper clothes. I went in wearing shorts and a tank top.”
But he believes that the panel looked through his unpreparedness and outfit and “saw I was so committed to movement. I wanted to learn so bad,” he says. “That’s why they took me.”
Getting in, however, was just the beginning. Next came “a rough three years” of intimidating work alongside classmates who at 11 and 12 already had been dancing half their lives. They had “the highest levels of confidence, so beautiful to watch. It took a toll on me,” Hickman remembers. “I complained to my mom that I was so stressed out. I was gonna
quit so many times. But she told me to keep at it, that I needed to learn in order to improve, that it would get better.”
Hickman stuck it out and made it to Dreyfoos, from which he graduated in 2017. Before starting college, he’d auditioned for the first time for “SYTYCD,” a show his late aunt had really liked.
“I wasn’t even disappointed when I got cut because I knew it wasn’t my time yet. I knew I was going to do it again, and I needed to go away and train a little more.”
So that’s what he did. Heading to Butler with thoughts of becoming a ballet dancer, now he thinks he might want to expand his style. And Hickman is getting a chance to do that on “SYTYCD,” where he’s gained the appreciation of celebrity judge and “High School Musical” and “Grease Live!” star Vanessa Hudgens.
“That’s been such a great experience. So many of us looked up to her from ‘High School Musical,’ and to have her on the panel and say she’s a fan of mine, and to hear her say that? That’s a humbling experience,” says Hickman. He hasn’t met Hudgens yet, but he says he’s so grateful to be able to make her feel something when he dances — to have her be a part of his “tribe.”
Evoking emotion, whether from a celebrity or just an appreciative audience member “is a major part of why I dance. There were so many obstacles and tribulations I had to go through, a lot that I was not happy about in my life,” Hickman says. “I found dancing was a way to connect with people through movement. It made me a different person. Just because you’ve gone through these situations in life, they don’t define who you are in the future.”