The name of the show is "So You Think You Can Dance," and Sabra Johnson thinks she can. She certainly hopes she can.
But the Utah native casts herself as the underdog in the Fox reality show — she's still at least a little bit surprised to find herself among the 20 finalists competing in tonight's two-hour episode (7 p.m., Ch. 13).
Unlike a lot of the competitors, Johnson didn't grow up with a burning desire to be a dancer. While she was attending Roy Elementary, Roy Junior High and Roy High, she had other dreams.
"I really wasn't going to be a dancer at all until I decided to move to Vegas, the 19-year-old told the Deseret Morning News. "About a year ago, I decided I was going to dance professionally.
"Originally, I wanted to be a fashion designer — like everybody else," she said with a laugh. "I just didn't have enough money to go to school. So I ended up moving to Las Vegas, deciding that I'd dance for just a couple of years, just for fun.
"So now I'm dancing. And this is where it got me."
One of the thousands who showed up at open auditions, Johnson may have the shortest resume among the 20 finalists. "I like to think of myself as the least experienced. ... So I think it's definitely an honor, because that must mean that (the judges) think there's some potential in me to grow and be great."
Johnson had a bit part as a "skater dude dancer" in the Disney Channel movie "High School Musical"; she taught dance in Utah and Las Vegas; she danced shows in New York and Las Vegas.
"I feel really lucky, and I just don't know where it came from," she said. "I feel so grateful to have whatever it was — natural ability, I guess. Because I know that it's a lot of hard work. People work their entire lives. I know that I still have a long way to go."
It seems like the possibility of winning "So You Think You Can Dance" — along with $100,000, a car and a contract in Celine Dion's Las Vegas show — hasn't even occurred to Johnson. She says she's looking at "So You Think You Can Dance" as "definitely the biggest learning experience I'll probably ever have."
"I just think I'm not really nervous yet because I don't understand it," she said with a laugh. "It's really hard work, but I'm really excited as of right now."
Excited but not overwhelmed. And that is due, at least in part, to the fact that it hasn't really sunk in yet that she's a finalist on a popular network-television show — a show that she wasn't all that familiar with before she auditioned. "I hadn't really watched it last year, I'd just kind of known of it. I just saw the audition (notice), and it was something I wanted to do.
"It really hasn't (sunk in) yet. It's just crazy. ... It's still really surreal to me."
E-mail: pierce@desnews.com