Energetic beat of creativity

One of special things about this season is the form that combines live and animated dance. Another is the design of the competition rules, which gives dancers more freedom to perform with imagination and express themselves, Lu says.

The young dancers are imaginative but lack enough experience in large-scale events, Lu says. After training for some time, they will receive assessments from master dancers of previous seasons on whether their works will meet audience expectation. Throughout the season, the camera will record their growth.

In the space of more than 10,000 square meters that the production team built, at different stages of the show, dancers will be able to play basketball, eat hotpot, make friends and get trained and assessed for the competition.

"We will see how young people make friends, and form teams and get them trained. ... This part of the show is new for this season," Lu says.

Unlike previous seasons, the new show will give the audience more opportunities to know about the dancers. For example, during auditions this time, rather than a single dancer's performance like before, contestants were required to form a three- to five-people team three days before, so audiences could see how they make friends.

"It's because unlike older dancers, these young people usually practice on their own and their biggest wish is to dance together with friends. Now young people rely more on social network to make friends. Many of them come to participate in our show, not for the championship but simply to bond with one another," Lu says.

As in the previous seasons, the audience will get to watch a variety of styles in street dance, such as popping, breaking, locking and freestyle. Compared with the past four years, the new season has more break dancers, who account for 26 percent of the participants, because break dancing has been included as a competition item in the 2024 Olympic Games in Paris.