So You Think You Can Dance (American season 12)

Series creator and executive producer Nigel Lythgoe returned as a member of the permanent judging panel, along with new permanent members Paula Abdul and Jason Derulo.

The Team Captains, Travis Wall for Team Stage and tWitch for Team Street, were consulted on the selections for each team during the Vegas Call Backs.

Mary Murphy, who was a permanent judge in seasons 3 through 6 and seasons 8 through to 11, has not returned. Host Cat Deeley returns for her eleventh consecutive season.

Season 12 featured a significant shift in format in that it was the first season where contestants were not selected based on their gender. Contestants were selected based on whether the competitor considered themselves a "Stage" dancer or a "Street" dancer. Stage styles included ballet, ballroom, contemporary, jazz, latin and tap, while the Street styles included freestyle, break dancing, hip-hop, and krump. Previously, the Dancers were selected across all genres and were divided by gender, with ten men and ten women being selected for the Top Twenty. This new format allowed the judges to respond to the strong number of female street dancers, and resulted in the Top Twenty, being eleven female and nine male dancers.

Once the "Top 20" were selected the public voted on their favourite dancers and the three stage and three street dancers with fewest votes were in danger of elimination. The mediums through which the public could vote continued from the previous season's methods of online through the So You Think You Can Dance website on fox.com, the Fox Now app, and SMS. Voting via telephone was once again not available.

The judges selected one stage and one street dancer from the remaining four dancers to be eliminated from the competition. When ten dancers were left in the competition, dancers were then eliminated purely on the votes from the public.

Season 12 saw the introduction of the ability for the audience to save one contestant from the stage and street teams from elimination, but only for the first four eliminations. When the Bottom 6 dancers were revealed during the live show, a five-minute period for Twitter voting was announced with one vote allowed for stage and for street per Twitter account. Once those contestants were saved, the judges were allowed to save one more dancer from each team for the first three eliminations; since the fourth was a double elimination, the Twitter vote was the only save; the judges had no say that week.

Once Top Ten were revealed, neither the audience nor judges were allowed to save any contestants.[2]

Open auditions for season 12 were held in five cities beginning on January 24, 2015.[1] Lythgoe, Abdul and Derulo were the three judges for all the auditions.

In a change from previous years, the city auditions no longer had a "choreography round," where dancers whom the judges thought might not be able to handle someone else's choreography were taught a routine they then had to perform.

Callbacks were held in Las Vegas for season 12, a return to previous practice after season 11's were held in Los Angeles. A total of 219 dancers were given tickets at the five audition cities to the Las Vegas callbacks: 114 were selected for Team Stage, mentored by Travis Wall, and 105 were selected for Team Street, mentored by Stephen "tWitch" Boss.[5] The first callback episode was scheduled for June 29, 2015,[6] and the second callback episode, during which the Top 20 of 10 stage and 10 street dancers is revealed, aired on July 6, 2015.[7]

• List of So You Think You Can Dance finalists