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Inside the High-Drama World of Youth Competition Dance

False eyelashes and real tears on the competition dance circuit.

By LIZZIE FEIDELSON

DEC. 21, 2017

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.

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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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Angelina Velardi, 12, at a dance competition in Ottawa in April.

Credit Dina Litovsky/Redux, for The New York Times

“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.

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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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Photo

Prestige dancers performing “To Build a Home” at the Showbiz competition in Hackensack, N.J. Credit Dina Litovsky/Redux, for The New York Times

“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.

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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.

Photo

Prestige dancers rehearsing before a competition. From left: Annalise Hofman, 13; Velardi; and Tiffany Benevenga, 13.

Credit Dina Litovsky/Redux, for The New York Times

On weekends when there were no competitions, Angelina’s team rehearsed all day. When I arrived at the Prestige Dance Academy 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.

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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.