Past the curtain, there’s a hundred people excitedly chattering with one-another under their breaths. On their own, you probably wouldn’t hear them, but when put together, they echo almost like waves hitting the shore.
She doesn’t hear any of it. She’s too focused on the task at hand.
Putting on a performance.
‘She’ is not just one person. She’s a ballerina who has danced for the better-half of her life. The young girl who just started competing two dance seasons ago. She’s retired, having stepped away from the sport after she graduated from high-school but still remembers every moment from a near decade-long career of pointing her toes and keeping her posture steady.
She encapsulates the quintessential experience of the Tri-Cities’s competitive dancers.
The Tri-City area is home to a blossoming competitive dance culture that has been budding for longer than many may believe it has. Studios like Pulse Dance Center, DanceForce, and Mellado Dance Elite house some of BC’s rising stars in the dance world. Year-in and year-out, legions of dancers from all schools partake in the same season-long process of competing for awards, though each experience remains vastly different.
Take Phonex Jonat’s journey, for example. A competitive dancer for 11 years with experience in nearly 10 different disciplines, she’s been dancing with Pulse since she was eight years old. Jonat’s first formal experiences with dance may have began with her baby ballet classes at the age of four or her first competition with Mellado at the age of seven — but if you ask her, dance called to her long before the lessons.
“When I was really young, my parents would catch me dancing with the TV, so then I went into those little ballet classes,” she explained in an interview. “I think I always kind of just liked moving to music. And then as I’d gotten older, like when I joined [Mellado] when I was seven, I just loved the feeling of being on stage. It’s incomparable to anything else.”
For some, it all begins at those primary-level dance classes. Paige Rurak’s dance experiences began when she took recreational ballet and tap classes at the age of four. Since then, however, her love for the sport has taken her all over the dance world’s map of disciplines. Her expertises led her from Caufield School of Dance to DanceForce in Coquitlam, though, at the end of the day, it was ballet that first brought her into dance’s world.
“My grandparents would actually always put ballets on their TV and stuff, and I’d always watch it, and my parents would just see how interested I was in it, so they decided to put me in there,” Rurak said. “I just thought it was so cool how they just get to express themselves on stage, and they get to do what they love. And I just wanted to do that too.”
The Tri-Cities’ dance scene has been waiting for its time in the spotlight. Let’s peel back the curtain and get a better look.