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Inside the High-Drama World of Youth Competition Dance
False eyelashes and real tears on the competition dance circuit.
The second time I met Angelina Velardi she had just lost a baby tooth. It left a gaping hole in her smile, but she liked how it looked: "Now if I show the judges I'm mature, they'll be more impressed," she said, happily. Angelina is a 12-year-old competitive dancer, and canny to the ways in which technical acuity and preadolescent pliability can be combined to her advantage. She started competitive dancing less than three years ago.
On a Friday afternoon last spring, Angelina and her teammates from Prestige Academy of Dance arrived at a technical high school in Sparta, N.J., for the Imagine National Dance Challenge, a children's dance competition. Each girl wore her black uniform and sported the team hairstyle, a low bun gleaming with hair spray. Dina Crupi, Prestige Academy's 25-year-old studio owner and competition-team director, had chosen the hairstyle for its versatility: It allowed various headpieces and hats to be put on and removed with ease. Crupi still had nightmares about last year's style, a too-complex choice involving a pouf encircled by braids. While she stood sipping coffee, the girls warmed up around her, brushing their fingers against the athletic-gray lobby walls for balance. With their small heads, shellacked scalps and long necks, the teammates looked elegant and creaturely, like a row of lizards.
This was Prestige's fifth competition this season, and its core team of 52 dancers would enter over 20 dance pieces over the course of the three-day competition. Angelina was a member of the preteen team, but there were also older teenagers and girls as young as 4 who were there to compete. The competition accepted dancers as old as 19, but the enterprise skewed much younger. At the dancewear booths ringing the lobby, the dance tops for sale were the size of dinner napkins.
In Prestige's dressing room, a classroom off a back hallway, Angelina donned her first costume of the day, a green one-piece with a choker neckline. She rubbed a deodorantlike stick (affectionately referred to as "butt glue") on her upper thighs to make the one-piece stay in place. MaryAnn, Angelina's mother, filled in her daughter's eyebrows with dark pencil. An adult face emerged from Angelina's little-girl one. She already had on fake eyelashes: She had fallen asleep in the car on the way to Sparta, so MaryAnn parked outside the competition and applied them without waking her, gluing individual lashes to her lids as she slept.
Angelina went into the hallway and did a few pirouettes. Crupi walked slowly past, appraising the girls' makeup and watching them for mistakes. She was wearing heavy eyeliner, too, and an all-black outfit to match her students'. They grew tense under her gaze, glancing at her for approval after each trick. "You're letting your rib cage open," Crupi said finally to Angelina, miming a puffed-up chest. She gathered the team for a last once-over. "Is everyone ready?" she asked. "Everyone sprayed nicely?" Some of the girls had gotten together earlier in the week to get spray tans, and they were an identical tawny color, like Easter eggs dipped in the same dye. The girls nodded. Crupi wished them a curt good luck and departed for the front of the theater.
Angelina loved her teammates, but before dancing she preferred to be alone. She practiced her turns again in the dim backstage light: eight pirouettes, then five. She moved so noiselessly that it was easy not to see her at all; when she dropped to the floor and assumed a plank position, I wondered for a second where she had gone. She popped up again and grinned at me, shaking her hands and feet vigorously to help rid herself of nerves. "I just need to zone out," she told me. "People get in my head."
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"It was never like this when I was a kid," Jared Grimes, 34, a prominent tap dancer and competition judge, told me. "These kids are like gladiators. The dominating, the mind games, the winning. It's all strategic." Grimes teaches at New York City Dance Alliance, a highly regarded competition company, and he routinely judges over 500 dance numbers in a single weekend. N.Y.C.D.A. travels to 24 cities per year. Each city has its own personality, he said. "Boston kids are a little bit more reserved, very careful, very guarded — details, details. Nashville is like, 'We're having a good time.' "
The competition-dance format is straightforward. On weekends, for-profit traveling companies host competitions for children in convention centers and hotels. Dance schools bring their students to compete. Judges, usually dance teachers or choreographers, score each piece on the spot, often out of 100 points. At the end of the day, winners receive titles and trophies. Sometimes there are small cash awards or gift cards.
The children who enter these competitions train up to 30 hours per week, primarily on weekends and after school. Because children must compete in many styles — hip-hop, ballet, jazz and others — versatility is essential, and training can be rigorous to the point of extremity. Each competition bestows its own regional titles, and bigger events also offer national ones. Studios choose which competitions to attend based on careful consideration of cost, quality and competitiveness. Some students compete nearly every weekend during the season, which runs approximately September to July, and train at intensives and classes during the rest of the year.
There are no official figures about how many children are involved in competition dance nationwide, but the number of national competitions has ballooned into the hundreds since the 1980s. In the late 1970s, one of the first of the organizing companies, Showstopper, held competitions out of the trunk of a station wagon. Last year, 52,000 dancers participated in Showstopper, and its touring fleet included a semi truck that transported trophies alone.
A turning point came in 2011, when Lifetime aired a reality show called "Dance Moms." A number of dance-themed reality shows premiered in the previous decade — "So You Think You Can Dance," "Dancing With the Stars" — but "Dance Moms" focused on relatable kids who aspired to be famous for their dancing, not adults. The show followed a Pittsburgh competition team at the Abby Lee Dance Company, reporting breathlessly on the wins and losses suffered by its team of preteens. "Dance Moms" emphasized drink-sloshing and hair-pulling by the team's parents rather than the particulars of the students' lives, but it made several young dancers, particularly Maddie Ziegler, now 15, into minor celebrities. The competition community almost unanimously considers the show in poor taste, but it normalized the idea of child stardom among competition-dance students, teachers and parents. When she was 11, Ziegler was cast by the musician Sia in a music video for her song "Chandelier." The video featured Ziegler as the sole performer, doing pirouettes, splits and kicks with a series of fierce facial expressions.
When I started dancing professionally four years ago, dancers I worked with would sometimes make one another laugh in rehearsal by whipping out old competition moves: preposterously wide smiles, coquettish shoulder tilts. As adults looking for dance jobs in New York, they had hurried to leave these overblown faces behind, like a newscaster trying to scrub herself of a regional accent. They wanted to be modern dancers, and maximal facial expressions aren't stylish in the world of concert dance, which is still the purview of college dance programs and conservatories. When competition dancers enter college or seek jobs in the modern dance world, they tend to tone down their "fire," as one former competition dancer put it, to fit in. She was a national-competition titleholder while in high school, but now she treated her competition past like a secret. She wanted to join a modern dance company, and competition dance is often considered better suited to music videos, concert tours or cruise ships. She felt that some of the companies she wanted to join, which performed exclusively in theaters, looked askance at her background. As mainstream as it has become, competition dance is still a distinct dance subculture, revolving around pop music, hard-hitting choreography and young female adherents. "It's a different world," Melinda Wandel, a mother of an 11-year-old competition dancer, told me.
Many competition dancers are drawn in by social media, where popular competition dancers and teachers have millions of followers. Others learn about it from adults. When teachers spot promising students in their studio's drop-in classes, they encourage talented kids to join the studio's team. Many children start competing as young as 5 or 6. Angelina first learned about competition dance on Instagram. She was a naturally gifted athlete who played softball, but when she saw pictures of competition dancers on a dancer friend's feed, she felt the pull of competition glow more brightly in her than it ever had for sports. "I wanted to be like that," she told me. "Because I knew it wasn't easy."
Angelina loved that competition dance was not only athletic but also beautiful. She liked dressing up. "There's definitely a pageant component to it, " Grimes says. Fake eyelashes, hair spray and crystals are de rigueur; Angelina's first few dances required fishnets. Some parents find the pageantry bewildering — "It sucks you right in," Wandel told me — but their daughters, and some sons, treat their jeweled headpieces and Vaselined teeth like armor. "We give her the choice," Wandel said. "You can skip class and go to the birthday party. But she'd rather die. She'd live at the studio if she could."
Dancers typically don't win cash for competing, and they pay to enter competitions. Most participants are white; the few predominantly black studios, like DanceMakers of Atlanta, on the city's South Side, know their students will be among the few dancers of color at most competitions they attend. Despite its cost — the families at Crupi's studio spend up to $25,000 per year per child on costumes, lessons and travel to out-of-town meets — competition dance isn't solely for wealthy families. One mother told me that she ate ramen to afford as many lessons as possible.
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"It's like they're training these girls for the Olympics," Grimes told me. "It's muscles on muscles on muscles." In the 1990s, a triple pirouette was considered impressive on the competition circuit. Now 10-year-olds can do eight or nine. The official record, set in 2013, is held by a competitive dancer named Sophia Lucia, who did 55 turns in a row without stopping when she was 10.
Despite the emphasis on technical tricks, there's something marvelously elusive about competition dance's definition of success. Dance is an art form: It's difficult to articulate how you know that one person is better than someone else. Judges grade dancers according to commonly held professional criteria — "I look at how precise they are, how their musicality is," the choreographer, teacher and competition judge Suzi Taylor told me — but selecting winners involves assigning favorites beyond point value. "You look at how they affected you," Taylor told me. "How that piece stood out beyond all the other pieces that were shown."
The opacity of judges' criteria is part of the form's appeal. Children know that they are always being watched: Every cross word in the hallway or eyebrow quiver of effort onstage will contribute to a judge's assessment of a favorite. "It's like an audition," Grimes told me. There's a mystery to winning a dance competition, which makes winning all the more intense. Unlike in sports, when a competition dancer wins, she comes away with the intoxicating knowledge that she is not just good, but also liked.
At one competition I attended last summer at the Foxwoods Resort Casino, in Connecticut, multiple women came armed with tissues, which they held ready in their laps before the dances began. I sat beside them in the over-air-conditioned room, feeling a little smug — I would not be needing a tissue! But when the lights dimmed and the first dance started, I suddenly felt overwhelmed. Alone onstage was a single blond preteen girl surrounded by lights; farther out, it was completely dark. It was like seeing a rare animal in the wild; I wanted to grab someone's arm. Her skill was both alarming — her limbs seemed to bend bonelessly, as if she were a doll — and, to my surprise, moving. She didn't look cute. She looked vulnerable and strong, sweating hard, eyes blazing. Although she was a child striving for the performance of an adult, only unaffected determination shone through. Despite the makeup and stage lights, she looked like herself.
When the announcer for Imagine National Dance Challenge called Angelina's entry number and the title of her solo, "Ideas for Strings," she walked onstage and lowered herself into a split in the middle of the floor. At her music cue, Angelina opened her arms wide and slid up into a low crouch, then spun around into a lunge. Her teammates gathered in the wings to watch. During her turn section, they counted her pirouettes. "Was that six or five?" her 13-year-old friend Tiffany Benevenga wondered.
Suddenly, the group recoiled and stiffened. I wondered if Angelina had made a mistake. "What happened?" I asked another teammate, Annalise Hofman, who was also 13 and often watched her friends dance with a stern look on her face. Annalise made a gesture of supplication, raising her hands into the air. "Oh," Tiffany said. "Angelina is just really good."
Angelina finished and scampered offstage. The dance was only three minutes long, but it drained her. She put her hands on her knees and panted. The other girls reached out to brush her back and shoulders with their hands as if touching her brought good luck. "Good job," they murmured one by one.
Angelina wasn't sold. "If I don't do it perfect, I get really mad," she told me. To her, every performance presented opportunities for mistakes — errors she couldn't feel, unnameable dips in quality. She was like a veteran rock star, who, having produced many hits, worries that her current work isn't measuring up and that the yes-men in her circle aren't telling her. She smiled absently at her friends, then sidled over to where I stood. "Was it good?" she asked me. I told her that it was. "What was the worst part?" she asked.
The evening crawled by in two-minute increments, long stretches of boredom punctuated by strong emotion. The girls ate ravenously at dinnertime, lifting chicken tenders gently to their mouths to avoid getting spots on their costumes. Between numbers, the girls Snapchatted one another while on opposite sides of the theater, or stood together so closely when speaking that they barely moved their lips. Every once in a while they clustered to scrutinize a dancer from another team while she performed. If she was good, they'd nod at one another contemplatively or raise an eyebrow. But none of the other local schools inspired much fear in the Prestige team, who were confident competitors. They had heard rumors, however, that at their next competition, an event called Showbiz, in Hackensack, N.J., they'd be competing alongside a team called the Larkin Dancers. Larkin's studio was intimidatingly large, with three different locations in the state. When Angelina watched videos of Larkin performances, she was "shocked," she told me. "They are perfect." The entire group could do triple pirouettes in perfect unison. Even some of the Prestige dancers' mothers were taken aback.
The awards ceremony for Imagine didn't start until nearly 11 p.m. It was a complicated affair: Like most dance competitions, Imagine had intricate prize levels ranging from four to five stars in quarter-increments, denoting different levels of difficulty and accomplishment. The competition also gave special awards for characteristics like being photogenic or having a great personality. Angelina and her friends looked on attentively as the announcer handed out prizes for "Heart and Soul" and "Best Character."
Angelina won in her age group. A stagehand placed a small tiara on her head, which Angelina knelt to receive. Moments later, she won another prize for her overall score. This time she received a thick, unwieldy plaque, which she balanced in her lap after returning to her seat. In order to be sure she was perceived as humble, she remained essentially expressionless, but she was happy. "I don't like to be too confident," she said.
When I said goodbye to Angelina that night, it was almost 1 a.m. She was sitting on her costume suitcase with her chin on her hands. Her hair, unwound from its tight bun, still held a pulled-back shape. The next morning, she'd awaken at 5 a.m. to stretch, apply her makeup and drive back from her home in Fairfield, N.J., to the next day of competition in Sparta.
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On weekends when there were no competitions, Angelina's team rehearsed all day. When I arrived at the Prestige Academy of Dance to watch one Saturday morning, the girls were lying bleary-eyed on the carpet, warming up. That morning they'd be working on "Seven Nation Army," their favorite small-group dance and one of Prestige's staple numbers — it often took first place at competitions. The dance featured the seven core members of the preteen group: Angelina, Annalise, Tiffany, Nicole Kelly, Alana Pomponio, Jenna Ebbinghousen and Marin Gold. The costumes were camouflage leotards, sparkly military hats and black fishnets with seams up the back. The music was a jazzy cover of the White Stripes' "Seven Nation Army," from 2003.
Compared with some powerhouse studios like the Dance Company in Salt Lake City or Club Dance in Mesa, Ariz., which have hundreds of students, Prestige is small. But Crupi had a strong vision for her fledgling studio. She was uncommonly disciplined and instituted rules that emphasized teamwork and uniformity: Every week, the children broke into groups and tidied the studio, gamely scrubbing mirrors and taking out the trash. In class and rehearsal, dancers were required to wear all black.
Before she opened Prestige, Crupi was a dancer for what was then the New Jersey Nets. The choreography she favored for her students was crisp and sleek; her favorite types of pieces were jazz dances, which she liked to costume with mesh and faux pearls. Her choreography wasn't conservative, but she coached her dancers to do saucy movements sharply and athletically, so that they looked more age-appropriate. When she arrived at the studio soon after 9 a.m. bearing coffee, she congratulated the girls for arriving earlier than she had. They had already been there alone for nearly an hour, silently practicing their pirouettes. She began the day's rehearsal by cuing up a previous week's judge's critique on her laptop. At every competition, judges record live feedback while the children perform, presenting studios with the commentary at the end. Studios rewatch the videos at home while rehearsing for the next competition.
The team huddled around; Crupi pressed play. Images of their bodies filled the screen. As difficult moments approached, the judges reacted in real time, emitting "Ohs" when the moves worked. A turn section approached; on the slightly fuzzy video, I could see that one or two spinning girls were slower than the others. "A little off there," one judge said. "Watch those turns."
"Look!" Crupi cut in. "Do we see that timing? That spacing? That arm?" The girls nodded.
They peeled themselves off the floor and spread out to run the piece. Crupi started the music. The girls began to snap their fingers slowly. One by one they whipped around and did a few solo moves. As the singer's voice plunged into a smokier register, the girls moved with more intensity, their small shoes stamping on the floor. They ground their rib cages and hips. Tiffany did an aerial — a handless cartwheel, body hanging suspended for a moment upside down in the air. The other girls stalked around the stage, strutting on their tiptoes. They smacked the floor with their palms. They did a double à la seconde turn, one leg whipping out to the side in the middle of each swift revolution, followed by a triple pirouette dropping into a split.
Crupi cut the music. The turning section still wasn't right. "When you're at nationals, it won't be good enough," she reminded them. "At nationals, there will be 8-year-olds that do these turns together." She had them try the turns without music. To keep time, the girls counted out loud in unison. Crupi watched, her chin lowered, eyes fixed at ankle level. "It's Angelina's that are off," she concluded.
Angelina sprang into the turn again. She did it several more times while everyone watched.
"What is she doing wrong?" Crupi asked.
"She's not opening to second position fast enough," Nicole said. Crupi nodded. The girls learned the dance in December and would perform it until nationals in July; although Crupi had created the dance, in some ways the girls knew the steps more intimately than she did. They could feel the timing in ways she couldn't, having sensed its elasticity together for months. When Crupi turned around for a moment, they negotiated further among themselves, behind her back. "It's slower than we think," Jenna mouthed.
Crupi split the girls into two groups and had them do the turns again. At one point she became so absorbed that she did a pirouette herself without remembering she was holding an open cup of coffee.
"That was bad!" she said. The girls laughed politely, but their eyes followed her warily when she walked from one side of the room to the other. After mistakes, Crupi turned away in genuine disgust, her nostrils flared and her mouth twisted. At first I thought she had adopted this behavior for strategic effect, but it wasn't a performance. When Crupi grew irritated with the girls, she began to act out dramatic scenes, growing unexpectedly emotional. Color shot quickly to her cheeks, and her voice grew thin and high with feeling. "Why would I cast Cindy if Cindy wasn't going to do the dance well?" she implored, wringing her hands.
Crupi was hard on Angelina. At competitions, she got angry when Angelina screwed up, becoming icy and giving her the silent treatment. "She treats me like a sister almost," Angelina told me. "Sometimes I get upset because she's really strict on me. I cry in the bathroom. I think, Why do I do this if I get upset so much?" To cope, she tried to focus on the big picture. "I'm learning from my mistakes."
Once, Crupi said of Angelina, "If I had the talent she had! ... " She said it in irritation, letting the statement trail off and shaking her head at me in disbelief. She was unembarrassed and felt no need to hide that her dreams for Angelina were tied to her dreams for herself. In a way, she even seemed proud.
By the time Crupi was satisfied with the turns, it was 10 a.m. She had the team run the whole piece one more time. "Don't be afraid to give me drama!" she yelled as they danced. She demonstrated, contracting her spine and shrugging her shoulders forward, conjuring an imaginary garment, something glamorous and strapless. Already huge and wet with the effort of projecting emotion, the girls' eyes grew even bigger.
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The long-awaited Showbiz meet with Larkin in Hackensack began on April 7. That weekend, there was a special guest: Du-Shaunt Stegall, a 22-year-old hip-hop dancer and competition-dance celebrity from Las Vegas who goes by the name Fik-Shun. Competition dancers with national exposure are not uncommon at regional events, whether they appear as featured teachers or — if they are young enough — competitors. Fik-Shun won Seasons 10 and 13 of "So You Think You Can Dance" and appeared in this year's season of NBC's "World of Dance." At this competition, the president and co-owner of Showbiz had arranged for him to do a special performance and pose for selfies.
When Fik-Shun took the stage for his performance at midday, the crowd of several hundred girls erupted in piercing screams. Fik-Shun paced bashfully, waiting for them to stop. When he began to dance, his body looked slippery, like a 3-D animation. In moments of crescendo, he sent a quaking motion from his chin to his toes. Angelina clutched Tiffany's arm: "So cool."
Afterward, Fik-Shun retreated backstage, where he was quickly encircled by teenage girls. Angelina's 14-year-old teammate Nicole Kelly paced back and forth, trying to muster the courage to introduce herself. Nicole, who had dark hair, long legs and a pleasant New Jersey accent, was famous on the internet. Her follower counts were high for someone who had never been on a competition-dance TV show. She had 20,000 followers on Instagram and over 800,000 followers on musical.ly, an app for short videos that has 200 million users and some of whose biggest stars are 14 and 16. But she wasn't sure Fik-Shun knew her handle, @nickisport. Other children were writing their Instagram handles down on a piece of paper to give to him, slightly irritated with themselves, like businesswomen who had forgotten their business cards. When Angelina handed him hers, she explained that her Instagram was set to "private," but she'd accept his request if he asked to follow her.
Angelina didn't want to have a public account, even though her mother would have let her. She was apprehensive of the attention she might receive, although the shape that attention might take was vague — she said she was worried about "not-normal people." Angelina didn't do any sponsorships or ambassadorships for dance brands; competition dancers who do are required to keep their accounts public. For these children, who are typically paid in merchandise, self-produced leotard modeling shots are susceptible to scrutiny by anyone with access to a smartphone. "Creepy" men were a constant threat among mothers, many of whom monitored their daughters' accounts and had blocked accounts with profile pictures that suggested an adult male user. One mother told me that these accounts, distressingly, often had nothing posted but pictures of infants. These users didn't message or harass their children, but their interest was suspect. Nicole's mother forbade her to wear T-shirts with her studio or other local businesses in her musical.ly posts, lest viewers learn where she lived.
For the Prestige team, social media was where they glimpsed other dancers' routines and the prizes they had won. They used social media to analyze the details of their competitors' bodies, looping videos of their tricks again and again, memorizing their strengths so they wouldn't be bowled over when they saw them in real life. Angelina spent a lot of time online tracking the movements of the dancer she perceived to be her main competition at nationals in Florida this year, a 12-year-old named Angel DiMartino Palladino, who was part of a studio in Ontario. On Instagram, Angelina gleaned that Angel had begun incorporating gymnastics tricks — or "acro," short for acrobatics — into her routine. "They do, like, standing back tucks and stuff," Angelina told me. She had resolved to work harder on her own performance skills as a result.
Angelina posted videos of her solos for her followers, as well as effusive birthday messages for her dance friends. "I post at the studio because that's where I'm happiest," she told me. But when I'd ask the Prestige dancers about Instagram directly, they would sometimes become evasive; a tight-knit group would dissolve, girls trotting down the hall away from my question. It was awkward to explain social-media apps to an adult. Sometimes the teammates would giggle when they said the word "Instagram" aloud, as though it was a piece of slang that, in my presence, grew suddenly strange in their mouths.
Nicole had an easier time talking about it. "I just perform dance, and people really like it," she told me. One evening in December 2015, when she was 13, she was featured on the musical.ly home page after she used the hashtag #featureme — she had been combing popular tags for months and adding them to her posts, which included both silly videos and clips that showed off her dance technique. Overnight, she acquired 30,000 new followers. Her numbers continued to grow. Last year, she went to a special meet-and-greet in Central Park with other famous musical.ly users to pose for selfies and give out signatures. At competitions, people were scared of her, she said. "They just whisper and wave."
Nicole delivered this tale to me in a matter-of-fact voice, bouncing her body rhythmically against the walls of the school's hallway. The other Prestige dancers gathered around to listen. I realized that they hadn't necessarily heard this story before; Nicole had only been at Prestige for a year. Her fame seemed so permanent to them that it was barely considered worth questioning.
"How did you get featured, though?" Angelina asked.
"Musical.ly saw it." Nicole said.
"What did they say?" Angelina pressed.
"They don't say anything," said Nicole. "They just feature you." She shrugged.
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The other girls nodded contemplatively and shook their heads in wonder. Fame was everywhere.
A few hours later, as I was leaving the gym, I saw Nicole barreling toward me, followed by Tiffany and Jenna. "We got him. We got him," she said under her breath. Fik-Shun loped unhurriedly behind.
Together, they posed in front of the stage doors for Nicole's musical.ly post. "Can you give us a countdown?" Nicole asked. Tiffany opened the musical.ly app and held the iPhone steady. "Three, two, one," she said. Fik-Shun did the robot; Nicole hiked her leg in the air, then released her torso to the side in an explosive lean, neck snapping back, one foot reaching dizzily into the air. It took about six seconds.
"You're going to be so famous," Jenna said softly.
"Can you AirDrop me this?" Fik-Shun asked. Fik-Shun didn't use musical.ly, and he peered with interest at its interface. "Wow, you have all these followers!" he said. After he walked backstage, Nicole slid to her knees and began replaying the video. Within several minutes, she'd received 814 likes.
The Larkin team, long scrutinized online, was even more intimidating in the flesh. The Prestige girls planned to watch their big number, set to a medley of Beyoncé songs, but it was so crowded backstage that they couldn't get to their usual spot in the wings. They retired edgily to the dressing room, noting that their mothers were in the audience and would be able to tell them how Larkin looked.
Eventually, though, the much-touted rivalry with Larkin seemed to dim. After the group number, while some of the older Larkin girls performed their solos, the Prestige teammates became consumed by a lengthy hair-braiding exercise in their dressing room and declined to watch. By contrast, Angelina stared hawkishly when Nicole, Annalise and Alana performed their trio, "Solo Dancing," a crowd-pleasing number with a heavy backbeat. "Solo Dancing" competed in the same category as "In Roses," Angelina's trio with Annalise and Tiffany, and the girls were never sure which number the judges would like best. "I'm happy for them if they win," Angelina said. "But I'm also like, O.K., I'm going to try harder next time. I still want to really get myself up there, too." Angelina would never say this to her friends. "I hide it, kind of," she told me. She congratulated them with genuine warmth as soon as they were finished, but she knew they were hoping to beat her, too. "They really want it," Angelina told me. "It's not worth it if you aren't asking yourself why you didn't win."
Rivalries with other schools were a necessary performance, but the most piercing feelings of competition were animated by their friends. After one competition, I saw a Prestige teammate turn to her friend and say, "You beat — " then utter the name of another close friend in a mangled voice, her mouth frozen like a ventriloquist's. The girl she had said this to flashed her an electric look of acknowledgment and pleasure, then turned toward her mother as though nothing had been said. And yet the teammates watched one another onstage with awe and possessiveness, like parents. Angelina's dreams about dancing included her teammates. Once, she told me, she imagined them all in the ocean together, doing their group number while also swimming like a school of fish.
Before "Seven Nation Army," the girls lined up backstage, the seams in their stockings plucked perfectly straight. For all of Crupi's careful instruction, she never stood with the girls backstage in the moments before they performed, so when pressing questions about the choreography bubbled up, which they invariably did, the girls hurriedly came up with the answers themselves. They hissed questions back and forth and improvised last-minute adjustments to timing and steps, making sure each girl understood the movement and planned to do it in the exact same way.
The previous summer, Crupi taught them snatches of the "Seven Nation Army" steps in class, testing them to see who was ready for the challenging steps she had devised. The girls knew it was an audition, and the class atmosphere was tense for weeks. Crupi encouraged their anxiety, wondering aloud if she should cast understudies. Angelina was worried that she wouldn't be picked. At 12, she was on the younger side of the preteen age group, which was mostly 13-year-olds. She felt she had ultimately been picked for "Seven Nation Army" because of her technique, but when Angelina first tried to look slinky and sophisticated in the way Crupi wanted, it didn't work. "You do more with your eyes and your body, like your hips and stuff," Angelina said, trying to explain the look to me. "You don't look mean, but like, 'I'm committed.' You have a little smirk." At first, her efforts produced a strange, unsensual energy; the other girls told her she looked "crazy." So Angelina broke down sultriness like any other move — as if it were a jump or a turn — and practiced it with her other choreography in her living room at night.
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Angelina and her friends linked performances like these to haughty indifference toward males: Nicole said that performing "Seven Nation Army" made her feel as if "all the boys are coming after us, but we don't want them." When she performed the piece, Nicole felt "strong," as if she and her friends were in "an actual army."
In the middle of their performance of "Seven Nation Army," Jenna's shoe, which somehow hadn't been fastened right, flew off her foot and had to be kicked into the wings. I didn't see it happen, but the girls had a blanched look when they came offstage. Jenna sat by her expandable makeup dolly and cried, the line of her scalp showing through the middle part in her reddish hair. The other girls offered comfort, approaching one by one and placing their hands on her shoulders.
Frantically, they donned their final leotards of the day. Crupi paced among them, livid about the shoe. "You're going to make up for all the bad dances we did today with this one, right?" she asked. The girls nodded and turned toward one another, standing shoulder to shoulder and bouncing on their toes. In this piece, called "Bloom," the girls played a flock of birds. "Think of your character," Annalise implored the group. "We are sad! Be the dancers we know we can be."
"Make her happy," one girl reminded the others, speaking of Crupi. The rest of the team groaned with recognition. Another riffed: "Make her cry with happiness!" The murmur grew. "No one can give less than 100 percent," Alana said over the sound. "Please. It won't work if even one person gives 90."
In "Bloom," Annalise played a bird with a broken wing; the left sleeve of her bird costume was strapped to her side, so she could only flap with her right. At one point, the dancers came together to form two giant wings on either side of Annalise's body, so that they looked not like a flock but like a single bird. The piece never failed to inspire emotion in the judges. During the tape of this particular competition, the judges stopped critiquing execution and started cooing "Oh!" and "Ah!"
One of the most-viewed competition-dance videos is called "My Boyfriend's Back (7 Years Old — Original)." It has been viewed almost 38 million times. The video was uploaded in 2009; the 7-year-olds in the footage are now high-school age. At least one still dances competitively. The dance, to a cover of the Angels' "My Boyfriend's Back," opens to excited audience screams. Three girls wearing striped two-pieces, thigh-high socks and matching bobs, stand in an aggressive, wide-legged stance. When the song begins, they mouth the lyrics, pouting and stomping. All are technically advanced dancers, but the combination of racy costumes, mind-boggling flexibility and slack-jawed facial expressions makes the video feel like too much, like something you aren't sure you should watch. The comments on the video, many of which profess to be from aspiring dancers, claim a mixture of suspicion and awe. "They look just plain innocent, but they dance like teenagers!" one reads. I asked Angelina if she'd seen the video — she had. "It is shocking," she told me. "The piece is more mature than their age," she admitted. "But it can be in a good way."
Earlier that year, Angelina went to see the Rockettes, but she came away unswayed. "I want to be a dancer," she told me. "Not just kicking my legs." She had heard of only a few professional dance companies, but she wanted to join one someday. "Why would I work this hard just to go nowhere?" she said. "I want to go into the bigger world." This summer, Angelina triumphed at the American Dance Awards nationals, snagging first place for the 12-and-under solo category. She posted effusively on Instagram, thanking her teachers, and later direct-messaged me to see if I'd heard she won.
At the final awards ceremony at Showbiz, the overall championship trophy stood behind the crowds of children, beside a table that sagged with the weight of smaller trophies. It was the color of Barbie's accouterments and the size of a shop mannequin. The Prestige girls looked at it furtively, as if they didn't want to jinx it. When it came time to announce the recipient, the announcer hesitated.
"Say it! Say it!" the Prestige dancers hissed.
Larkin won. Blue team jackets flooded the stage.
It was all over.
Crupi climbed slowly toward the place where her team sat. She wore a dim smile; everyone needed to be on their best behavior, despite not having won. "Group pic!" she commanded. Since they didn't have a huge trophy to fawn over, the girls admired a choreography award Crupi had received instead. It was pyramid-shaped with sharp-looking edges, made of glass.
Cameraphones clicked. Angelina posed and grinned before leaving the stage. I saw her give herself a searching look in a mirror placed backstage. Then she did a little move. It wasn't something I had seen her perform before. It was something else, her own gesture.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/21/magazine/inside-the-high-drama-world-of-youth-competition-dance.html
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