My wife is not a television person, but for the past few weeks she has been entranced by a reality show, nearly addicted to it.

The program is about dancing, which she loves, but she kept telling me I should watch it too because dancing embodies a person's culture. The show brought together people from widely disparate backgrounds and required them to cross cultural and racial boundaries, she said.

Ah, socially relevant reality programming; a person could justify watching that. I checked it out.

It's called "So You Think You Can Dance." Young dancers compete to win $100,000 and a New York City apartment, or at least on paper that's why they're there. You don't have to watch long to see they really are competing because each one has dance at his or her core.

The producers held auditions around the country and came up with 50 people from thousands who danced for them. The 50 were pared to 24, then to the 16 who would be the center of the TV show. Unlike some reality shows, there were no laughable duds. These were all good dancers.

You could see how dancing fit into their lives. Allan, for instance. Neither his mother, who had him at 14, nor his father was part of his life. He took up dancing because he had no friends, and he found not only his talent, but people who accepted him.

Allan is a hip-hop specialist. The way the program works, dancers draw from a hat their partner and the kind of dance they will perform each week: lyrical, jazz, ballroom, hip-hop, Latin and so on. He had to learn how to dance with a partner. He's a big man (everybody calls him Big Poppa), but he did it gracefully.

Eventually he was cut, though, because despite his compelling story his dancing outside his own form didn't rise to the level of the others. This is a country in which it helps to be competent across cultures. And it seemed harder for the hip-hop dancers to gain the judges' respect when they crossed into ballroom or lyrical, than the other way around.

But it's fascinating to watch a person steeped in one art form and culture try to fit another. The dance styles really do reflect the person who is drawn to them. Dance is rooted in culture.

Jamile and Destini did a ballroom number that I thought looked great, but the judges said they didn't like the attitude they brought to it; their playful facial expressions, and maybe a little too much soul in their movements. It was a black couple's take on an essentially white art form.

I loved the way they did it, but I could understand why the judges were bothered, and why some ballroom dancers seemed too stiff doing hip-hop.

All of the dancers got the technical stuff down. They know how to dance. But the stuff that comes from inside and enlivens a performance shone brightest when a dancer was moving to a beat that resonated with him or her.

Yet they all were game for exploring other dance cultures, and sometimes they got it. "You're one funky white girl," one of the judges said when a contestant who'd never done hip-hop nailed a performance.

The contestants were black, white and Filipino American, and sometimes the judges seemed to react to those differences lamely, but the contestants themselves were focused on dance.

The show says something about America, about the different worlds we inhabit within one country and about the possibility and potential beauty of reaching beyond your own walls and embracing someone else's reality.

The show is approaching its end, but I hope they do it again. It really was cultural enrichment.

Jerry Large: 206-464-3346 or jlarge@seattletimes.com

His column runs Thursdays and Sundays and is found at www.seattletimes.com/columnists.