Melissa Manchester is an American singer-songwriter and actress. Since the 1970s, her songs have been carried by adult contemporary radio stations. She has also appeared on television, in films, and on stage.
M People are an English dance music band that formed in 1990 and achieved success throughout most of the 1990s. The name M People is taken from the first letter of the first name of band member Mike Pickering, who formed the group. In December 2016, Billboard magazine ranked them as the 83rd most successful dance artists of all-time.
Adam Gabriel Garcia is an Australian stage, television and film actor who is best known for lead roles in musicals such as Saturday Night Fever and Kiss Me, Kate. He is also a trained tap dancer and singer. Garcia has been nominated twice at the Laurence Olivier Awards in 1999 and 2013 respectively.
Heather Small is an English soul singer who was the lead singer in the band M People and later became a solo artist. Her debut solo album was Proud, released in 2000. She was also a contestant in the British television show Strictly Come Dancing in 2008.
Howard Paul Donald is an English singer, songwriter, drummer, pianist, dancer and record producer. He is a member of English pop-group Take That and a judge on the German reality talent show Got to Dance.
Alesha Anjanette Dixon is an English singer, rapper, songwriter, dancer, author, model, television personality and television presenter. Dixon rose to fame in 2001 as a member of the all-female R&B/garage/rap trio Mis-Teeq. The group disbanded in 2005 and Dixon pursued a music career as a solo artist, signing a recording contract to Polydor Records. She began recording her debut solo studio album, Fired Up, in 2005, releasing her debut single, "Lipstick" and "Knockdown", she was dropped from Polydor. Retaining the rights to her album she released Fired Up in Japan with Lipstick going to number 1.
Matthew Koon is an English stage actor and dancer. He is most noted for participating in the Sky One television series Got to Dance, in which he reached the final, finishing in 4th place. Matthew is now a Junior Soloist at the Northern Ballet. Koon joined the company in 2013.
Britain's Got Talent is a televised British talent show competition, and part of the global Got Talent franchise created by Simon Cowell. Presented by Anthony McPartlin and Declan Donnelly, it is produced by both Thames and Syco Entertainment, distributed by Fremantle, and broadcast on ITV every year in late Spring to early Summer. The show premiered on 9 June 2007 following the success of America's Got Talent the previous year; it was initially planned for 2005, but a dispute between the broadcaster and its originally intended host led to production being suspended for two years.
Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance is a music and dance conservatoire based in London, England. It was formed in 2005 as a merger of two older institutions – Trinity College of Music and Laban Dance Centre. Today the conservatoire has 1,015 undergraduate and postgraduate students based at three campuses in Greenwich (Trinity), Deptford and New Cross (Laban).
Series Two of Britain's Got Talent, a British talent competition series, began broadcasting in the UK during 2008, from 12 April to 31 May on ITV. Following the success of its first series, ITV commissioned the programme for additional episodes, which allowed production to increase the number of semi-finals that the competition incorporated, and thus subsequently increase the number of participants that secured a place in the final. Auditions that were filmed took place across a larger variety of cities across the United Kingdom. Both the judges from the first series - Simon Cowell, Amanda Holden and Piers Morgan - and the hosts Anthony McPartlin and Declan Donnelly, returned for the second series, along with Stephen Mulhern returning to front the second series of Britain's Got More Talent on ITV 2.
Series Three of Britain's Got Talent, a British talent competition series, began broadcasting in the UK during 2009, from 11 April to 30 May on ITV. Prior to production taking place, producers originally intended to expand the judging panel to include a fourth judge, but later dropped this idea; the intended newcomer, Kelly Brook, was credited as a guest judge for her involvement in a session of auditions. Apart from this, no major changes took place with the programme.
Norske Talenter is a Norwegian-based talent show with a similar format to Britain's Got Talent, which thus makes it one of the Got Talent franchise programmes. The 16-year-old singer Erlend Bratland won the first series and Quick, a hip hop dance group, won the second series. The judges were music producer Jan Fredrik Karlsen, singer and actress Mia Gundersen and comedian/actor Thomas Giertsen. In 2008 Marte Stokstad and Sturla Berg-Johansen were hosts, and in 2008, Berg-Johansen joined Pia Lykke to be hosts.
Got to Dance, originally titled Just Dance, is a British dance competition that was broadcast on Sky 1 in the United Kingdom and Ireland from 20 December 2009 to 28 December 2014. Auditions for the show were held in specially built "Dance Domes" and are open to all dance acts of any age, style or size but must be of an amateur level.
Must Be the Music is a British television musical talent competition contested by aspiring singers and musicians drawn from public auditions. The show is a music competition and reality show that was broadcast in the United Kingdom and Ireland. Auditions were held in Edinburgh, Manchester, London and also held in Ireland. The show began airing in August on Sky1, and was also simulcast in HD. Fearne Cotton presented the show. The first and only series was won by Emma's Imagination, a female singer from Dumfries.
The Mend were a British boy band consisting of members Kris Evans, Jay Kontzle and Craig Worsley. They originally auditioned for The X Factor in 2011 but failed to get any further than bootcamp, due to having a management deal. They went on to audition for Britain's Got Talent in 2012 and reached the semi-finals but, after the public vote was invoked, due to the judges' split decision, they failed to go through to the finals. They were then brought back by the judges for the final and finished in seventh place overall. They released their debut single "Where Were You" on 24 March 2013, independently.
Dabbing, or the dab, is a simple dance move or gesture in which a person drops his or her head into the bent crook of a slanted, upwardly angled arm, while raising the opposite arm out straight in a parallel direction. Since 2015, dabbing has been used as a gesture of triumph or playfulness, becoming a youthful American fad and Internet meme. The move looks similar to someone sneezing into the "inside" of their elbow.
