LIVING: Twirling teens take the floor
By Erica Jacobson
Free Press Staff Writer
MONTREAL -- The lobby outside the ballroom at the Hilton Montreal Bonaventure looked like a high society gathering, but it was really a locker room.
Tuxedo tails flew as men strode across the hall, competition numbers pinned to their backs. Feathered ball gown hemlines fluttered as the feet of women dancers rapidly stomped the ground to warm up leg muscles. Couples chatted away in Danish and German, Italian and Russian, as well as French and English.
It was Feb. 10, midway through La Classique Du Quebec, a four-day international ballroom dance championship. Joe Larose, 18, and Meg Pedrick, 15, milled around with the 35 other couples waiting to compete in the amateur ballroom championship. This is their first time up against the world's best -- adults.
Joe, at 6 feet 2 inches, towered over his competitors even though he's a high school senior from Alburg. Dispatched to the line with hugs from her parents, Meg is a freshman at Northfield High School. She wore a royal blue sequined gown made by her mother and just enough lipstick and mascara to make her look older than her 15 years.
The pair have danced together for two years as Vermont's only competitive teen-age ballroom dancing couple. They belong to the United States Amateur Ballroom Dancing Association, which has 996 dancers nationwide between the ages of 4 and 18. They're ranked 11th in the nation in the youth standard division after last year's national championships.
Because Vermont's competitive circuit is non-existent, Joe and Meg learn from lessons and videos. Their few chances to gain experience have come when they watch and dance in the occasional competitions, but until recently those had been mostly against dancers closer to their own age.
With ballroom dancing recognized by the Olympics and potential inclusion by the 2008 games, the restructured age categories now place the couple onto the dance floor with the world's top amateur adult dancers.
"They don't really know what they're up against seeing as they learned in a void," said their coach, Bobbi Davies. "I don't think they think it's as hard as it is."
Seven couples, including Joe and Meg, spilled onto the brightly lit wood dance floor. The ballroom is cavernous and dark, hiding the several hundred watching the competition. A dozen judges stood between the dance floor and the spectator tables. The crowd stood next to their tables -- and sometimes on top of their chairs -- to get a better view.
"It's like throwing them into the lion's den," Davies said. "Every time, they come out with a little more zing."
The music for the waltz swelled, signaling the start of the dance. Meg smiled, tilted her head and walked into Joe's open arms.
Joe's first moves
It wasn't Joe's idea to start ballroom dancing.
Both his father and his then-stepmother had to convince a 9-year-old Joe to take lessons with his 6-year-old stepsister, Becca Plote.
Davies, a former ballroom dancer and a registered coach, already taught Becca baton twirling at her studio in Champlain, N.Y.
"I was skeptical," Joe said. "I didn't want to do it, but they convinced me to do it for my sister."
Joe and Becca practiced together and attended a few competitions over the next several years, but the two were never partners. Instead, they danced in a now-defunct professional-amateur division where Joe barely came up to the chin of his professional partner, Wendi Davies, his coach's daughter.
The agreement had been that if Joe didn't like dancing, he could quit at any time. Becca stopped, but Joe enjoyed competing too much, continuing even though he didn't have a regular partner for seven years. Sure, he took a little ribbing from friends in grade school, said his dad, Mark Larose, but that didn't discourage him.
Joe now successfully juggles dancing with school, Boy Scouts and a part-time job at The Grain Shed in Alburg.
"I've seen him change an awful lot in confidence in himself," Larose said.
Despite how polished Joe looks on the dance floor, though, there's no getting around the fact that he is a teen-age boy. Just days before attending the Montreal competition, he accidentally put a pair of dry-clean-only dance pants into the wash. His arms outgrew his tuxedo dress shirt, so Davies spent a night inserting and hand-stitching additional cloth halfway down the sleeve.
Joe gets frustrated with dancing, especially when he can't do things perfectly. Criticism is tough to swallow. "I thought maybe I'd lose him at one point," Davies said, "but he was right there and kept on."
Joe's perseverance often came at the urging of his father. "He knew I was getting a lot out of it," Joe said, "and I didn't realize it."
Round 1 in Montreal
Standing on a chair near the dance floor, Davies watched her students sweep and twirl through the first of five dances they performed as part of the first round. Davies' gray ponytail nodded as her head followed Joe and Meg on their counterclockwise trip around the dance floor during the waltz.
From the waist up, the smiling couple floated across the floor as if feathers propelled by a gentle, twisting wind. Their legs, meanwhile, threaded and knitted in perfectly matched steps. Meg looked into the space over Joe's right shoulder, and he looked for spaces to steer the couple without running into the 12 other dancers on the floor. Less than two minutes after it began, the music stopped. Joe and Meg and the other couples filed off of the floor as judges handed in their completed scoring sheets.
Davies explained, "The thing they look at in the first round is poise and quality of movement. Period. They don't have time to look at anything else."
Joe and Meg appeared behind Davies with cups of water in their hands and a sheen of sweat on their faces. They only had a few minutes before they were due out on the floor again for the second dance, the tango.
Davies wasted no time in critiquing their performance. Joe needed to keep his head up, not bowed over the top of Meg's head. His arms should be out and squared, even if another couple came too close. "Whack them, Joe," Meg said of dancers entering their space. "No," Davies said, "don't whack them. Just don't give in your arm line."
The pair disappeared back through the crowd to line up for the tango. That afternoon, Davies had spent 90 minutes helping Joe sharpen his steps, teaching him to lunge into his steps rather than slide. "This is the one where we hope we did some good," Davies said, "or otherwise this one will be a bit of a disaster."
The dance began. As Joe led Meg around the floor, his knees were too crouched, his legs too bent. The tango had become more of a fox trot. They struggled to keep smiles on their faces. Davies' hands went from being gently folded in front of her stomach to solidly crossed over her chest. "Not so good," she said. "No good. He's just lost it for a moment. It was his best dance a month ago."
Perhaps it was nervousness. Perhaps it was that both had been ill the previous week. "He's got the talent to become a world champion, really," Davies said. "It's the timing and if it all comes together."
Today it was not. She was not happy with the tango. She was even less impressed with their next performance -- the Viennese waltz. She turned to tough love. "I don't think you've got what it takes," she told Joe, leaning over from her perch on the chair. Joe turned sharply and marched back toward the dance floor, leaving Meg wide-eyed next to Davies.
"Bobbi's not very happy with Joe," Meg said, "and Joe's not very happy. We could definitely do better. We're not dancing very well today."
How Meg got started
Meg attended her first ballroom event with her parents when she was a child. Her parents, who have taken dancing lessons with Davies for years, couldn't find a baby sitter, so she danced a waltz with her dad, Bill, and sat down. "I would sit at a table and watch them for hours," she said. "They thought I was bored, but I just liked watching them."
As she got older, Meg danced ballet and jazz. In January 1999, she took her first ballroom dancing lesson when Davies paired her with the Joe. It seemed like a perfect fit. Soon the two were dancing several skill levels above Meg's parents. Yet, they rarely spoke. "We were just both really shy, and we didn't know each other, so we just didn't talk," Joe said. "I don't quite know why we didn't talk. I never quite cared for it. "And now Bobbi can't shut us up."
It often looks like Meg is just along for the ride during a dance as Joe sweeps her across the floor, but she does her share of the work. "We'll take lessons, and we'll spend two hours working on one step and where your foot's going to fall," she said. "Sometimes it feels like you don't know why you're doing this because you can't even do this step."
If certain steps still elude Meg, she's mastered other skills. She's gotten used to the hair-spray fumes needed to shellac her long golden brown hair into a perfectly neat bun. Her gown goes on in a fraction of the time it takes Joe to install himself in his tuxedo. She'll say that fixing a smile on her face for 90 seconds feels weird, but it's there come competition time.
Combine these victories with the couple's high ranking at last year's national youth championships, Davies said, and Meg has come a long way in a relatively short time. "That's sort of given her a chance to believe in herself," Davies said, "and believe in the whole thing."
Dancing past defeat
Back on the dance floor, Joe's head was still down during the fourth dance, the fox trot. Their final dance, the quickstep, went a little better. But it was not one of their better performances.
Davies mused about Joe having all the right pieces and needing to get them in the right places; Meg's mother, Carolyn, kept smiling on the sidelines. "Just getting out there and not standing out like a sore thumb is an achievement," she said. "That's a world stage out there." On this day, though, it was clear they would not be advancing to the quarterfinal round.
Joe and Meg watched top-ranked English dancers Jonathan Crossley and Kylie Jones dance the quickstep. Then they headed back to Davies' hotel room to change, passing a flip chart in the lobby that confirmed their suspicions -- they were out of the competition.
Once back in the room, Joe dismantled the pieces of his tuxedo and put on a dress shirt and pants. Meg slipped into a tank top and black pants. While things hadn't gone exactly as planned, they looked to what they could take away from the competition.
"There's nobody like that anywhere near" Vermont, Joe said of the couples they competed against. "It's better dancing than we got to see in a year."
Meg zipped on a pair of chunky black books. "You know what stuck and what didn't," she said. "You know what you have to keep working on."
At the end of May, the pair will dance for the first time at England's Blackpool Festival, the oldest and most prestigious of the world's ballroom dancing competitions.
Changed and now part of the audience, Joe and Meg watched the couples who will be their competition for years to come.
Joe's thoughts on the world's best dancers? "With enough practice and enough time, we'll be beating you."