Everything I Learned About Life, I Learned in Dance Class (10 page)

Your facial features change, you start to breathe a little heavier, and then the tears well up in your eyes. I’m watching, remember? Everyone’s watching! And
now
you turn on the emotion? Really? Where was all that passion and honesty in your performance? Why are you showing everyone your true colors
now
, when it doesn’t matter anymore?

When you cry because you didn’t win, you look like a poor sport. You have to suck it up and put that smile back where it belongs. (A) You are representing me and the ALDC. (B) You may come across these judges again in your competition years—you don’t want them to remember the kid who didn’t win, but instead to remember the kid who should have won! I am training you to be a professional, so you must wait until you leave the venue, get back to your hotel room—alone with your mom—and then, and only then, sob into that pillow.

Abby Lee Apparel

“SAVE THOSE TEARS FOR YOUR PILLOW”

Nobody wants to be around a crying child. Have you been to Disney World lately? There are more kids screaming their heads off at the “Happiest Place on Earth” than anywhere else on the planet. Nobody wants to go to dinner at an expensive restaurant only to have a baby wailing away at the next table, especially when you made the effort to hire a babysitter for your kids so
you
could enjoy a romantic evening out.

Everybody wants to see a child happy and healthy. Then we have the nasty boo-hoo temper-tantrum crying, and certainly no one wants to see that. You see the looks when a child is acting out: people are calling the parents weak or idiots for putting up with the little brat who’s behaving this way.

You have to remember that the girls on the show have a lot to deal with—being a member of the cast of
Dance Moms
is no piece of cake. The girls are rehearsing new numbers each week, listening to their moms yell at one another and watching them stab each other in the back—all while they’re trying to just be normal kids. Each handles it a different way. Paige and Brooke are on their phones doing God knows what. Nia has always got her nose in a book. Mackenzie is doing a backflip and giggling, while Kendall is doing her makeup. Chloe is conspiring about something with her mom, and Maddie is watching dancers on YouTube.

The girls all have different ways of expressing their emotions. They have to learn how to deal with chaos because they have to use their feelings and emote during every performance. I’ve worked with all kinds of kids over the years: kids who are cold and who can’t express themselves, kids who hold everything in and use the stage to show it, kids who have faces that tell a story, and kids who look clueless.

Then I have the kids who try to downplay their successes. We had that problem with Maddie in Season Three when she was winning and was very much downplaying each win. One time she received a crown when we hadn’t even realized she’d been entered in the finals. When they placed the crown on her head, she took it off and gave it to the kid next to her to play with. The owners of the competition were probably thinking, “Here’s Maddie, the star of a TV show, winning our competition, and we’ll get all these pictures of her in this crown and put it all over our website.” I can only imagine how they must have felt when she took off the crown and passed it off to someone next to her! Turns out she didn’t want the other kids in our group or their moms to be mad about another victory—not mad at her necessarily but angry with her mom. She was worried they would treat her mom badly. She later told me that all that was going on in her head while she was out there trying to dance. Not knowing this ahead of time, I flipped out on her: “There are two hundred kids sitting behind you that would have cut off their right arm to get that crown on their head.” And it’s true.

My students participate in dance competitions because it’s their opportunity to get onstage and perform. Years ago they didn’t have competitions; they just put on shows. My mother, Maryen Lorrain McKay, owned and operated several dance studios in Miami, Florida, long before I was born. From 1945 through the early 1960s. Her students performed in the best hotels up and down South Beach. Her teen queens were employed as backup dancers for Sammy Davis Jr. and Dean Martin. Even her small-fries performed for the children who accompanied their parents to Florida for the winter holidays. They may have been paid in stuffed animals and toys, but they still got paid.

Nowadays, it’s all about competition. Look at how many TV shows we have that pit people against one another:
American Idol, The Voice, The X-Factor, Dancing with the Stars
. Come on: wise up! These days, criticism comes with the territory. You have to have some pretty tough skin just to survive.

Dear Abby:

Many of the girls on my daughter’s team are getting frustrated because there is one particular student who never keeps up with the choreography. What can we do to help the girls deal with this frustration?

The ability to comprehend dance movement quickly is an asset to every professional dancer. However, this decision, this frustration, this problem is up to the dance teacher—not the moms, and not the other girls. If this child who’s screwing up the choreography is causing them to lose competitions, the teacher will address it, fix it, and possibly lose a student—losing tuition money—but that’s the way the cookie crumbles.

Abby

THERE’S NO SUCH THING AS “OBJECTIVE”

Seriously—sometimes I have to question what judges are thinking when they award points. There’s no rhyme or reason to it. It’s whether they like you or not. Sometimes they don’t like the song or the costume or even the makeup. Go figure. Sometimes I’ll create a dance routine that I just love. I don’t care what anybody thinks of it, because I believe in it. If we don’t win, fine, I’m okay with that. That’s the way it is: the people calling the shots get to choose who wins and who loses. When you try to succeed in life, you’re just putting yourself out there, heart and soul open, to be judged, and you have to be ready to accept all criticisms, even when you don’t agree with them.

Judges
always
have an opinion. They could hate the color red, hate the song “The Rose,” or their pet peeve could be a dancer rolling around on the floor in a lyrical dance. It’s their opinion, and they have been hired to give their expert opinion of you and to write down a score. There’s no such thing as complete objectivity when it comes to scoring a dance performance. Sometimes the determining factor in a score can be who went before you or after you. There could be a dancer before you who gives a terrible performance and the judges increase your score because your performance looks better in comparison. The problem is that if you follow a bad dancer, but then more great dancers perform hours after you, you may end up with second or third place because the judges were basing your score on the low score ahead of you. It is actually better to follow the performance of a great dancer than a really bad dancer, so your score is higher if you outperform the great dancer before you. It’s probability and statistics. See, I really am concerned with education.

It’s all relative and based on who a judge sees perform next. A judge may give you a 98 and you think you’ve done amazingly well and the judge loves you, but then you realize that the judge is just a high scorer who gives everyone a 98. It’s the kid who gets the 100 from her who wins. It’s a numbers game, back to the math again. And you thought dancers only had to count to eight.

Another thing about dance judging and competitions is that scores are not posted right away as in sports like ice-skating. The teacher picks up the scores later. The judges know who won, but nobody else does. So if you win, you don’t know if you won by ten points or by two-tenths of a point. Sometimes the judges will give a high score for the entire day of the competition, and that’s a big deal. Like when Maddie wins highest score for the day after competing against sixteen- to eighteen-year-olds. That’s huge, because Maddie is only eleven!

Dear Abby:

My son dances in the house all the time and really wants to dance, but he has a learning disability. How do we find the right dance studio for him?

I strongly believe in checking out all the dance studios in your area, or because it’s a boy, a little out of your area. Not everyone in the neighborhood needs to know what he’s doing on Saturday afternoon. He should have the freedom and confidence to follow his dreams without others judging. Regarding the learning disability, I’ve had kids who were dyslexic and they shine as dancers, because when they look in the mirror, everything makes perfect sense to them. If it’s a slow learner or perhaps some type of ADD, you never know. In dance class, learning is very different from academic classes that require books. They might pick up things quickly and that might be the way to go. Maybe that’s their outlet, how they emote and get through the day. I would give it a try, but I wouldn’t go in saying he has a learning disability, because that’s just as bad as walking in and saying he’s the next Mikhail Baryshnikov. Parents shouldn’t do that either.

Abby

ABBY’S BLOND BOMBSHELL

by Koree Kurkowski

Abby has always been someone I looked up to, listened to, and of course took correction from. She was the adult figure in my life who taught me a craft that has been my passion since the age of five. I continued dancing after graduation and I am still performing daily. A few years after leaving the studio and while I was dancing professionally in Las Vegas, Abby came to visit. We reunited with hugs and stories. I decided to give her the Vegas treatment and buy her a martini. One martini somehow led to another. By the end of the night, I was doing ballet barre at the bar! I thought I wasn’t a student anymore. I guess I was wrong! It was a good experience seeing Abby let down her guard and have some fun. At the end of the night we went to her room to order room service. Abby fell asleep pretty quickly, but no worries—I enjoyed the famous fried rice from the Mirage by myself before heading home.

Koree Kurkowski
fell in love with dancing at age five. She danced competitively with Abby Lee during her school years, then signed with Royal Caribbean while a senior in high school and performed for about two years with Royal Caribbean and Celebrity cruise lines. She moved to Las Vegas at age twenty after being hired as a showgirl/dancer in
Jubilee!
(“I was the shortest in the show at that time.”) Other Las Vegas credits include
Pin Up, Sin City Kitties, Bite
, and
Fantasy
.

MAN UP!

When your kid is on the firing line, will she crash and burn? This is one of the reasons I’m so tough on my students. I would prefer for them to cry in front of me, their mentor, in the safety of the studio, not at an audition, baseball tryout, or ROTC boot camp in front of four hundred of their peers. When you walk into my classroom, I’m going to give it to you straight, just like in the real world, because that’s the only way to prepare you for the real world. Part of my job is correcting flaws. It needs to happen. Better me than the first person auditioning you for a Broadway show, interviewing you for a job, or evaluating you for a promotion.

Showing a range of emotions onstage in a lyrical performance is wonderful. Performers taking on roles such as Helen Keller or Lizzie Borden require a range of emotions teetering on hysteria. These routines are what we call tearjerkers. It’s great to be so expressive that you make the audience feel your pain or bring them to tears. Offstage don’t sweat the small stuff and get so worked up about every little thing. My mom was always rattled about one thing or another. Relax.

If you’ve been in my class for years, then you know that sometimes I come in and I’m in a rotten mood. It is a teacher’s job to leave her troubles on the doorstep. The dance studio should be a place to set your spirit free, to forget your problems and just dance like nobody’s watching. Then again, you’ve seen the moms I have to deal with, so let it roll off your back. You know I love you. Don’t tell me your knees are black and blue, and then never wear knee pads or complain because your mother won’t buy them for you. If you carried your sled up a hill of snow ten times and now your calves are killing you, don’t come to me complaining about how sore you are. And don’t tell me your legs are sore from dance class when I know what the curriculum is and I know there is no way your legs could be sore from dance class.

The parents at the studio think I’m a big ogre. They want to coddle and hug their kids, and shelter them from the big meanie. They tell their kids that
I’m
wrong and
they’re
perfect the way they are. I tell the parents that if they want to save their kids from me, take them somewhere else. The parents and the kids know what they signed up for. They’ve been there since they were two years old. The studio was fine when they were three and four, five and six, and even seven and eight. Then the show started. They were happy customers until they had a little money and a little power. Then they became complainers. I am actually nicer on camera than I normally am, because there are things you just can’t say on TV. I would never say anything racially offensive, but I would say, “This is a black piece. It’s about Katherine Dunham,” or I might say, “You need to feel like you’re in that cotton field and you’re carrying that basket.”

I have a lot of male dancers and I’ll tell them, “You look like a woman,” or I’ll say, “What do you think you’re doing? Britney Spears doesn’t want ten androgynous guys dancing behind her—she wants
men
!” I can’t make comments like this on TV, because viewers will say I’m homophobic. Of course I’m not. In reality, my male students wouldn’t be where they are today if they danced like girls. These men have to lift female performers and make them look pretty. This is how I normally speak to my students, but on TV, I can never say those things.