Inside the High-Drama World of Youth Competition Dance (Published 2017) (2024)

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.”