What Set tWitch Apart as a Dancer? His Generous Spirit.

What it takes to make a dancer is impossible enough: discipline, strong muscles and bones, coordination, flexibility. When a dancer has all of those characteristics but also rises beyond, when technique is braided with heart and warmth, well, that dancer becomes a different kind of artist entirely.

Why is the death of Stephen Boss, known as tWitch, so shocking? It’s not only that he died by suicide at the young age of 40, but that it revealed a disconnect in how we knew him. His dancing was animated and enhanced by an all-too elusive quality: a generous spirit.

People understood that. The mark he left on dance — and on the world beyond it — is evident by the reaction to his death on social media. Messages poured in, from Ellen DeGeneres, whose show he was part of for nearly a decade; from Michelle Obama, from Billie Jean King. Justin Timberlake, who knew Boss for more than 20 years, wrote on Twitter that “he always lit everything up. You just never know what someone is really going through.”

A career in dance is hard; one in commercial dance may be even harder. Dancers are revered, yet are often treated like objects or placed in infantile situations. In an online interview for the premiere of “Magic Mike XXL,” Boss was asked who would win a dance off between him and Channing Tatum? His eyes are bright, but weary — a here-we-go-again moment of dance being dumbed down.

“I’m a dancer,” he says. “It’s what I do. It would be like if someone asked Channing if you two were to do a monologue, who would be better? He’s an actor.”