A very unexpected Israeli duo is competing in the finale of “America’s Got Talent.” As judge and Jewish dad Simon Cowell said, “I’ve never seen anything like this before.”
The pair is Roni Sagi and her Border Collie, Rhythm, who have been gracing the stage with their breathtaking choreographed dances. Sagi, 32, a former professional dancer, runs a business called Keta Tov — which means “a good bit” — that teaches dog owners to dance with their dogs. The proof is in the pudding, as her performances on the reality TV competition have wowed the judges, catapulting her all the way to the show’s 19th season finale airing this Tuesday night.
In her audition for the show, the judges seemed skeptical of the contestant when she told them her dog Rhythm is — in the words of that great Snap! song — a dancer. But then, dressed in a white and lavender outfit, Sagi’s first dance with Rhythm to the tune of Sia’s cover of “California Dreaming” had the judges dropping their jaws. “Oh my God” Cowell exclaimed as he saw the dog dancing to the music, running and twirling across the stage before jumping into his owner’s arm and moving fluidly to her commands.
“He actually dances better than the human dancers we’ve had on here,” Cowell told the excited Sagi. Fellow judge Howie Mandel agreed that their performance was a level above last season’s winning duo — which also happened to be a human and dog team. Each one of the four judges, including Sofia Vergara and Heidi Klum, passed the two onto the next round with enthusiasm.
Since then, Sagi and Rhythm have performed in the quarter final to Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody,” and last week, in the semifinals to “Flashdance… What a Feeling,” a bit that Mandel called “better than the movie.”
“I wish we could put this all in a bottle,” Klum said of the energy and skills shown on stage, acknowledging the training that went into the number. Vergara asked to take Rhythm home and praised their synchronicity, while Cowell said that their dance was better than anything he’d ever seen on the show before. “If this was the Olympics, I would score this a 10,” he said.
That particular performance was emotionally charged — the prerecorded choreographed dance was shot around the time that news about the murder of the six hostages in Israel came out, and Sagi felt haunted by it. While the show shies away from politics, Sagi and her sister, Sol, a dance studio owner who was there to both support and help with choreography, felt frustrated that they couldn’t be back home in Israel to march with their fellow Israelis in solidarity and shared grief. Sagi decided to pay tribute to the hostages by putting a yellow ribbon through her head, a detail that Sol shared on Instagram to the sound of this year’s Israeli entry to the Eurovision competition, “Hurricane” by Eden Golan.
“So proud of you for dedicating this performance to the hostages, our brothers and sisters that were taken brutally from their home,” Sol wrote in the post.
Sagi also wanted to express her feelings about the terrible news and decided to share a message about the biggest lesson she learned while working with Rhythm for over two years. She said that their training taught her that “you can speak two different languages and still connect. I hope this is a message that people take not just for this kind of show but for living in general.”
While Sagi, originally from Kfar Saba Israel, didn’t think much about her responsibility to represent her home country when she first auditioned for the show back in March of 2023, she now sees her participation as an “opportunity for a moment to do something big, to make people look at us in a positive way,” she told the Israeli publication Ice. While she’s not the only Israeli contestant to participate in the show — including this season’s joint Israeli and Palestinian choir, which participated in the quarter finals — she has made it farther in “America’s Got Talent” than an Israeli ever has before. Sagi says that dancing with dogs “teaches us to be the best version of ourselves, because working with the dog makes you be understanding and attentive and know how to explain yourself in a way that is clear and pleasant, know how to read the situation, when do I push a little… to create communication with an animal that doesn’t speak your language.”
A former professional dancer, Sagi found Rhythm in Poland after searching far and wide for just the right dog to dance with, and said she first saw his sense of musicality when he was just a few weeks old, tapping his little paws against the bed. Sagi gives Rhythm instruction as they’re dancing, and she has to depend on his responses to match the music. Rhythm gets very little external motivation from toys or treats; a lot of this training is about her puppy just getting the thrill of being engaged and challenged. Sagi has been teaching classes on how to dance with dogs for half a decade now, and she says that the most important thing about them is that they are a bonding experience for owners and their pets, a chance for them to have genuine fun together.
Rhythm isn’t the only one of Sagi’s dogs that has participated in a hit reality franchise. Her other dog, Pesach (Hebrew for Passover), recently participated in the latest Israeli season of “Dancing With the Stars,” dancing with actor Dor Harari (“Dismissed”) and professional dancer Julia Shachar, who ended up winning the competition.
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This Tuesday night, she’ll perform a number live along with nine other finalists. She says she has been rehearsing it for the last five days, but in her Instagram stories today, shared she was nervous because “the routine is not ready, nothing is ready. I have no idea how I feel about it, I am just crossing fingers that everything will work out tomorrow… because this routine means the world to me.”
“I don’t think there’s an Israeli today that is anywhere in the world and is getting judged 100% based on who they are as a person or their profession,” Sagi told Maariv this week. “The fact that you’re Israeli sometimes makes people look at you less positively or more positively, I just know that what I do with Rhythm is so special that I have no doubt that even people who don’t love Israel as much — if they have a little bit of room in their hearts for dogs — even if they won’t vote for me, will see how unique that is.”
We wish these two the best of luck at tonight’s final! If you want to vote for Roni and Rhythm, you can do so on the NBC website.
