Strictly ballroom
27th annual SnowBall Classic is like a real-life Dancing with the Stars, featuring hundreds of bedazzled and glittering international dancers competing for world amateur titles.
Leanne Chang was just a toddler when she saw a television commercial for Vancouver’s annual SnowBall Classic and ran to her mother to announce she wanted to dance. With a partner. Just like the couples on TV.
Her mother, Stella Liang, dutifully enrolled Leanne in ballet and Chinese dance classes, but she was too young for ballroom. Besides, who could partner a two-year old?
But Leanne was persistent. When she was five, her mother relented, but there was one condition. She had to convince her fraternal twin, Ronald, to partner her.
“I didn’t want to,” Ronald says. Leanne convinced him, but after the third class he announced he wasn’t going back. He thought he danced like a robot, and besides, his friends were telling him dancing was for girls.
But Leanne wouldn’t give up, and Ronald relented. The 10- year- olds, who will be Ballroom dancing attracts people of all ages — many of whom will don dresses and sequins next weekend for the SnowBall Classic competing in the 27th annual SnowBall Classic in Vancouver next weekend are now Canada’s champions in the juvenile division, and consistently rank in the top three in the U.S.
“They are athletes,” says their coach Kyryl Dudchenko as they power through a cha-cha at Vancouver’s Broadway Ballroom. “Leanne is incredibly strong, and Ronald has an amazing fluidity. And they are tough. I can push them.”
But their mother never pushes them. “It’s all them. I never ask them to compete. I only want them to compete with themselves, to be consistent and learn the benefit of hard work. What they do here will help them in every challenge they face in life.”
It’s a thought echoed by another couple coached by Dudchenko: Scarlett Liaifer and Zika Trajkovic.
At the Crystal Ballroom on Southwest Marine, music plays from a cellphone propped on a chair in a small, mirrored studio. It is Sunday morning and the pair goes over a tricky sequence of steps. Their hands join and
come apart, their bodies undulate and flow, their feet slide, hitch and turn.
They stop, speak softly to one another, mark the shape of the difficult steps in the air with their hands, and start the short sequence again.
“A dance is like a puzzle and we work on it in pieces,” says Trajkovic, 17.
The Grade 12 student and his partner, 19- year- old Liaifer, are B.C.’s reigning Adult Latin Dance champions. They are also students who should probably be cramming for mid-terms, or pulling shifts at their part-time jobs — Liaifer works at a pharmacy and Trajkovic waits tables at Earls — but nothing is more important right now than this rumba sequence.
The duo has a title to defend at the upcoming SnowBall Classic, which attracts some of the world’s best competitive ballroom and Latin dancers.
Liaifer and Trajkovic are high achievers off the dance floor as well. Liaifer is a chemical biology major at UBC, and plans to go to med school; Trajkovic will be heading to UBC engineering next year.
“Everything we do, the commitment, the attention to detail, working as a team helps us and transfers to the other areas of our life,” says Liaifer.
The competition
For two days, the SnowBall Classic will turn Vancouver’s Hyatt Regency into a real-life Dancing with the Stars, complete with sequins, rhinestones, feathered dresses, triumphs and tears.
The event features hundreds of bedazzled and glittering international dancers competing for world amateur titles in multiple categories showcasing dancers as young as eight, and as old as 80. There are also Pro-Am categories, in which amateurs of all ages compete, partnered with their teachers and coaches.
Although ballroom and Latin dance has been popularized by shows like Dancing with the Stars — and internationally there is a push to get competitive ballroom dance, now known as dancesport, a berth in the Olympic Games — in Canada there is little cultural support.
Unlike many countries in Europe, dancesport isn’t part of our regular public education curriculum and it doesn’t get any government funding. Its unique combination of art, athleticism and glitz, as well as its judging style with multiple couples on the dance floor at once, leaves it a little misunderstood.
Dancesport failed to make it onto the IOC’s list for the 2016 Olympics — it was beaten out by camera-friendly golf, rugby sevens and in-line speedskating. While it is similar to figure skating, the debate over whether it is an art or a sport, whether it can be judged objectively, and whether it could garner a wide television audience seem to be sticking points.
For dancers like Liaifer and Trajkovic, the Olympic debate seems far removed from the challenge and pleasure of learning and competing.
The SnowBall Classic is open to the public and it’s worth a visit not just for the dancing, but also for the glitz, the dazzling overthe- top costumes, the fierce competition and, yes, the tans. Mention the tans, however, and Liaifer is quick to correct one common misconception: “We don’t spray tan because it rubs off on our costumes.”
Liaifer says most dancers use a thick, waxy makeup to deepen the colour of their skin. “Hotels always warn us in advance not to ruin the towels,” she says.
Liaifer and Trajkovic won’t just be there to compete — they are hoping some stardust rubs off on them when they share the dance floor with their idols, like Denmark’s Umberto Gaudino and Louise Heise, who are among the top-ranking Latin dancers in the world.
Liaifer’s eyes light up when she talks about competing with the couple: “We are star-struck.”
The competitive ballroom and Latin community in B.C. has about 350 members, and is the second-largest in Canada after Ontario. Gaudino and Heise will be working privately with many of the couples they compete against while they are here because mentorship is as much a part of the culture as competition.
“The community is very tightknit,” says DanceSport B. C. president and SnowBall organizer Pinky Wong. “On the floor, the dancers are rivals, but off the floor we are all friends.”
The rivalry is friendly, but with up to 10 couples on the floor at once vying for the judges’ attention, dancers have to negotiate spaces they are not used to and make split-second changes to their carefully choreographed routines.
The pace is rigorous and as exhilarating as it is exhausting. In the Latin category, couples dance repeated heats throughout the day, until the finale, where they have to pull off five dances in a row, a minute and a half each of samba, cha-cha, rumba, and paso doble, ending with an exhausting, wickedly fast jive.
Sharing the dance floor with their international idols is a dream come true for Liaifer and Trajkovic. “It’s such an amazing experience. You dance next to them, you share the floor with them, brush up against them. There is a huge aura of positivity and it just inspires you.”
The excitement has Metro Vancouver’s two main studios — the Crystal Ballroom and Broadway Ballroom — buzzing.
Dancing for health
Michelle Peng, director of the Broadway Ballroom, started dancing in 2005 when she began to suffer serious neck pain from computer work.
Her doctor recommended ballroom dance.
“It helped me elongate my neck and back, my whole body changed,” Peng says. She also discovered she had talent.
She threw herself into the world of dance and began competing in the 10-dance Pro-Am category, which includes salsa, cha- cha, rumba, tango, jive, waltz, Viennese waltz, foxtrot and quickstep.
Peng was so enthused she found the centrally located space at Broadway and Oak, and built herself a ballroom.
Peng, who has a 31-year-old daughter, won’t give her age, but like everyone swirling around the Broadway Ballroom floor under the chandeliers, she is slim, radiant, and upright.
“I feel younger now than when I started,” she says.
For Liaifer and Trajkovic, the SnowBall Classic will be bittersweet. They hope to dance forever, but they know that pursuing careers in engineering and medicine means dancing may soon take second place in their lives.
Meanwhile, as Leanne and Ronald work on their rumba under the close eye of coach Dudchenko, their mother watches from the sidelines. “They are so dedicated,” Stella says. “The times I am with them, helping them follow their dreams have been the happiest times of my life.”