Dance Competition

On the O’Shaughnessy stage in St. Paul, forty dancers get up in glittering military chic and tap in perfect unison to Janet Jackson’s Rhythm Nation 1814. They toss off complex steps, inject some get-down hip-hop moves, maneuver in kaleidoscopic patterns. A panel of judges scrutinizes the proceedings as the audience hoots and hollers. This is not the touring version of So You Think You Can Dance? It’s a corps of teenagers from the Larkin Dance Studio in Maplewood, performing at the Hall of Fame Dance Challenge.

From March through June each year, hundreds of local kids—from tots on up to those about to graduate from high school—participate in regional and national dance competitions like this one. They and their parents spend thousands of dollars and turn families, friends, and relatives into rabid fans. Unlike the poky dance-school recitals familiar to some, with their homemade costumes, dinky theaters, and ragged lines of little girls rigid with stage fright, these spectacles play out in major venues before audiences of competition veterans with high expectations.

At dozens of studios scattered throughout the suburbs, and in outstate cities like St. Cloud and Brainerd, children train in tap, ballet, jazz, and break-dance in hopes of eventually making it to a national championship. The larger studios, such as Larkin and the Summit School of Dance, with studios in Plymouth and Wayzata, enroll more than a thousand kids each year. Students of competition dance, as it’s known, can spend twenty hours a week sweating with their teams while their parents shell out up to a thousand dollars a month on classes, costumes, entry fees, travel, and housing.

“Competition dance became a fad in the 1970s, in the South and on the East Coast,” said Shirley Larkin, who founded the Larkin Studios in the early 1980s and was one of the first locals to offer classes in competition dance. “I was against the idea, but when I finally attended a competition in New York, I thought, ‘My kids can do that.’ By the end of the 1980s, if you weren’t doing competitions, you were out of business.”

Competitive studios exist in a universe separate from the galaxy of professional ballet companies, modern dance ensembles, and culturally specific dance companies working in the Twin Cities. Most of the performers and audience members at dance competitions think of dance more as sport or entertainment than fine art. Competition dancers purge their routines of what they might consider esoteric artiness by pumping up the adrenalin. They pack maximum energy, enthusiasm, and technical virtuosity into a few minutes of pure power, with every other move culminating in a flip, splits, or a trick like the ubiquitous Scorpion’s Tail, in which the performer pulls her leg up behind her head like a contortionist. Meanwhile, more aesthetically oriented dance fans believe that the “sell-it” approach to dance in competitions is antithetical to movement as an art form. “In terms of energy output, some of these routines are the dance equivalent of wham, bam, thank you ma’am,” said one Minneapolis modern dance choreographer.

“Sure, I push for bigger and better,” acknowledged Michele Larkin, who, with her mother Shirley, co-owns the Larkin Studios. “Three pirouettes isn’t doing it anymore—I make them go for nine.” Larkin teaches and rehearses seven days a week and has choreographed many prize-winning routines. She criticizes some college and university dance programs for “pooh-poohing competition kids. Their attitude is that these kids have to start from scratch because they have learned too many tricks. Instead, they should appreciate and embellish what these talented dancers bring.”

By the same token, students accustomed to dancing at full throttle all the time may feel confused or even insulted when they enter an academic dance program that asks them to radically realign their posture, or to lie on the floor and concentrate on breathing. “These kids sometimes have a totally different view of dance than we do,” said Toni Pierce-Sands, co-director of the TU Dance company and an instructor at the University of Minnesota. “But they bring an energy and confidence to performing—they really understand that.”

National enterprises with monikers like Showstopper and Star Systems are the competition world’s power centers. They organize the events, hire dance professionals to adjudicate them, and award prizes to teams and individuals that range from honorary plaques to cash awards and scholarships. Studios pay entry fees, collected from individual students, and compete in categories based on age, style, and the number of dancers (ranging from solos to groups—or lines—of forty or more). Style categories include jazz, tap, ballet, and lyrical, the last being a mix of ballet, modern, and acrobatics that focuses on interpreting songs. Routines can run anywhere from three to eight minutes, and often incorporate elaborate costumes and sets.

Studios that accumulate the most points overall at local events become eligible to compete at national events, often held in sunny destinations like Las Vegas or Daytona Beach. Most studios compete in three to six regional competitions per year, and go on to at least one national final.

At last year’s Hall of Fame Challenge, eight-year-olds in glitzy orange sequined costumes were strutting their stuff to “Great Balls of Fire” at O’Shaughnessy by 8:30 a.m. Watching grade-schoolers channel showgirls brought up eerie echoes of JonBenet Ramsey. Indeed, many parents would doubtless prefer that their daughters waft gracefully as Nutcracker snowflakes rather than shake their booties while Jerry Lee Lewis howls (or vamp to Rick James’ “Super Freak,” as in the recent hit film Little Miss Sunshine). But parents of competition dancers see their children growing in positive ways. “My daughter was so shy, she was almost invisible,” said one mother. “Now that she’s dancing, she’s become confident and outgoing.”

Later that day, the Larkin Junior Line of twelve- to fourteen-year-olds shimmied to a different drummer: The harem motif (one guy, many girls) of their Middle Eastern-themed number was a clever artistic solution to the chronic shortage of males in competition dance. The performers undulated in fluid, faux-Oriental moves punctuated by flips into handstands and dives to the floor—an impressive display of technical fireworks and choreographic savvy for which Michele Larkin won the Junior Line Choreography Award.

At the Hall of Fame Dance Challenge, the audience shouted and applauded for wildly diverse routines that ran from 8 a.m. up to midnight: a 1920s flapper number; a lyrical tribute to the bond between fathers and sons, featuring a line of seven boys; a routine in which girls in tuxedos spun like tops, hats balanced on their toes, to Depeche Mode’s “Personal Jesus.”

While this mix of poignancy and pizzazz, spirituality and spectacle may seem jarring, it is certainly part of a time-honored American tradition. The commingling of serious art and popular culture has enlivened the arts here for at least a couple of centuries. It gave rise to Bruce Springsteen’s heartland rock, for example, and the populist notion that Dolly Parton and Zubin Mehta are equally worthy of Kennedy Center Honors—not to mention the peculiarly American sentiment that both athletes and artists get validated by keeping their eyes on the prize.

The antic eclecticism of competition culture is firmly anchored in the bedrock of family life. Parents work backstage, building and moving sets, and sell tickets out front. Dads act as security guards. Many studios actually have dad, mom, and even father/daughter teams that compete in special performance categories. Loren Johnson, interviewed while rehearsing a routine with several other dads to Elvis Presley’s “Jailhouse Rock” at the Larkin studio, got involved so that he could see his daughter once in a while. “She’s at Larkin 24/7,” he said.

The work ethic and team spirit that infuse dance competitions appeal to many parents, especially those of boys, who are still a vast minority in this heavily female culture. As with most other dance forms, boys are given advantages: scholarships, reductions on class fees, and, some believe, extra “penis points” in competitions. “Boys are attracted by jazz and tap because they like to make noise,” said Linda Muir, a teacher at the Summit School. “They like to perform gross motor moves, and they enjoy competing. [The competitions are] quantifiable for boys, and for their fathers,” that is, everything ultimately translates into a score.

“I liked the camaraderie of studios. If you screw up, everyone suffers,” said Nick Straffacia, who started dancing at age three at the Northland School of Dance in Champlin. In 2005, when he was eighteen, he joined the Minnesota Dance Theatre, where he was one of the few studio dancers to make an immediate transition to a professional ballet company. There, he “was expected to be more mature and self-motivated.” He has since continued his dance training at New York University.

Most studio kids, however, rarely pursue careers in dance as adults, and one reason is their lack of exposure to professional concert dance. Megan McClellan and Brian Sostek, co-directors of the popular Minneapolis-based company Sossy Mechanics, view the bridging of the gap between the art and studio dance worlds as a win-win endeavor. They’ve produced a highly successful series of performances called Bright Lights/Dance in the Dark that mixes studio, street, and professional dancers.

That strategy translates into “more audience for us and more exposure for them,” said McClellan, speaking of the studio kids. She herself studied at the Keane Sense of Rhythm, a tap dance studio in St. Paul, and competed at many events before crossing over to modern dance. She and Sostek maintain that each system has much to offer the other. “In competitions, you learn about dance as a performance art,” she said. “It’s always about trying to show off and having fun. On the other hand, studio kids often have a false sense of what’s required for a professional dance life. They learn dance as a spectacle full of gimmicky stuff that they will never be asked to do anywhere else.”

True, a dancer auditioning for, say, the James Sewell Ballet may never be asked to demonstrate a Sea Jump—a stunt that involves rolling up from the floor over one’s shins into a backbend jump and simultaneously grabbing the feet from behind. But, McClellan insists, “learning these tricks makes you a huge risk-taker. You go for extremes and you’re not afraid to fall on your butt and get up again.”

And, given that contemporary ballet and modern dance increasingly demand performers with Olympic-level gymnastic skills who can also move at warp speed, what hotshot choreographer wouldn’t break a leg for a chance to work with kids like these?

Competition Calendar

Showstopper
April 13–15
Northrop Auditorium, Minneapolis
www.showstopperonline.com

Hall of Fame Dance Challenge
April 20–22
St. Paul RiverCentre, Roy Wilkins Auditorium
www.halloffamedance.com

Showbiz
April 25–29
Minneapolis Convention Center
www.showbiztalent.com

Starpower
May 4–6
Minneapolis Convention Center
www.starpowertalent.com