If you’ve ever watched the television show Dance Moms, you’ve gotten a taste of this underworld-in fact, it’s possible my company even competed against Abby Lee’s girls at one point. I was in.įrom the start, the competitive dance world, which revolves around tacky hotel ballrooms, Day-Glo costumes, and camcorder-wielding mothers, seemed to me rather “Little Miss Sunshine.” It’s a beauty pageant-like arena, with pre-teens sporting spray tans, toddlers wearing red lipstick, and parents living vicariously through their showboating children. I wasn’t a particularly prodigious dancer, but I had long legs, comically pliable hip flexors, and “good feet”: high arches and a winged turnout that looked divine when sheathed in the satin of a Grishko 2007 pointe shoe. I only joined because of geography-when I moved from Long Island to central New Jersey at age 15, I left behind the old recital-centric dance studio where I had studied ballet, tap, and jazz since kindergarten and enrolled in the dance studio in my new Jersey town, which just happened to have a competitive company that I was invited to audition for. I knew dance competitions were bizarre from the get-go, and that initial feeling of disillusionment kept me from being whole-heartedly rah-rah about the trophies, the sequined costumes, the false eyelashes, and the dazzling choreography, even as I bowed to applause myself. I suppose I was a dance competition skeptic because I entered the game late: I was a member of a competitive company between my sophomore and senior years of high school, from ages 15 to 18-that is, during the height of my teenaged ennui. That first dance competition proved to be an accurate introduction to the whole enterprise. Applause and the wolf-whistles of my classmates’ mothers filled my ears as my company scampered off the stage, and I felt, for the first time in a long time, elated-if only for a few moments before I blinked the stars from my eyes. I had forgotten about how amateurish the judges had seemed. By the end of the dance, as I held a heel stretch in front of one of the judges and smiled like a maniac, I had forgotten all about the absurdity of going ahead with a recreational event in the midst of a dangerous storm. A shitty sound system blared Jacques Offenbach’s “Orpheus in the Underworld,” and we kicked in time with the frenetic music. Soon I was on that parquet stage, which didn’t seem quite so paltry as my company jetéd across it and the performance adrenaline kicked in. Even if I was unimpressed, I was still going to give this my best shot. I was whisked into a “dressing room” - really just a conference room teeming with half-dressed little girls getting their pink tights yanked on - where I wiggled into my own yellow-crinolined costume and touched up my black liquid eyeliner. In the ballroom I found my classmates, a gaggle of girls who were already sporting the black velour spaghetti strap leotards and black skirts with crinolines of different primary colors for our upcoming can-can dance. But even in a state of emergency, a dance competition must go on-or so I had thought before I arrived and saw how underwhelming the scene of my very first dance competition was. Later that night, the governor would declare a state emergency and ban all vehicles from the road. The five-mile drive had taken us an hour. It was a Saturday evening in late January 2005, and my Aunt Alice and Uncle Joe had driven me to the hotel in the midst of a blizzard that dumped about 18 inches of snow in the area. Surely all these mothers shellacking their squirming toddlers with hairspray needed to get a grip. Surely these three disinterested-looking middle-aged men and women sitting in front of that parquet floor could not be the judges who would hand down the final word on how well we executed the routines we had spent scores of hours practicing. As I walked into the ballroom of the DoubleTree Hotel in Somerset, NJ, I thought to myself, Is this all there is? Surely this dimly lit room, with its tacky maroon-and-cream geometric-print carpeting and a paltry expanse of parquet flooring for a stage could not have been the competition sphere that my classmates had talked up for months.
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