Dancers: Firm had culture of sex, silence
LOS ANGELES — Every year, one of the world’s leading dance competition companies sells the dream of Hollywood fame to hundreds of thousands of ambitious young dancers hoping to launch careers on television, in movies and on stage.
But behind the bright lights and pulsing music, some dancers say they were sexually assaulted, harassed and manipulated by the company’s powerful founder and famous teachers and choreographers, according to a joint investigation by the Associated Press and the Toronto Star.
The problems date back to the founding of Los Angeles-based Break the Floor Productions; as the company has grown into an industry powerhouse, its leaders perpetuated a culture of sex and silence, according to interviews with dozens of former and current staff and students.
Break the Floor’s reach extends across the entertainment industry to some of the biggest names in music, television and social media. Alumni and faculty have danced on stage with Lady Gaga and Taylor Swift, at the Oscars and the Super Bowl.
Company instructors have appeared on “Dancing with the Stars,” “Dance Moms” and “So You Think You Can Dance.” When COVID-19 lockdowns suspended in-person workshops, Break the Floor enlisted social media superstar Charli D’Amelio, whose TikTok account has around 10.5 billion likes, to record instructional videos.
The company was launched 22 years ago by a charismatic dancer, Gil Stroming, who came to fame in the 1990s, performing in the off-Broadway show “Tap Dogs,” described in the New York Times as a “beefcake tap-athon.”
Break the Floor now draws around 300,000 dance students, some as young as 5, to packed hotel ballrooms across the United States and Canada for weekend workshops and competitions.
But in January, as the AP and the Star were investigating allegations of sexual misconduct against him and others involved in the company, Stroming announced that he had sold Break the Floor and stepped down as CEO.
The new owner, Russell Geyser, said the allegations have nothing to do with the current company, and that people involved with purported misconduct no longer work for Break the Floor. In his first 10 days as CEO, he said four people were “let go.”
Allegations of sexual misconduct first hit the dance company in October, when the Toronto Star revealed allegations of widespread sexual harassment and predatory behavior by Break the Floor instructors.
A Toronto-born teen alleged a famous choreographer propositioned her for sex just hours after judging her at a 2012 Break the Floor convention. An Ottawa dancer working as an assistant for the company said the same choreographer groped him in public.
Who was involved
An ongoing investigation by the Star in partnership with the AP now has uncovered alleged sexual misconduct that stretches back to the dance company’s early years, and involves Stroming himself.
Stroming was allegedly involved in a series of inappropriate relationships with students of the dance program he was running, according to more than a dozen former staff and students.
All of these sources spoke on the condition of anonymity in fear of retaliation and damage to their careers in the tight-knit professional dance community.
Stroming declined repeated interview requests.
In a written statement, he told the AP and Star, “I have been very upfront that when I first started the company at 19, over 20 years ago, there were issues of inappropriateness.” He didn’t respond to the specific allegations.
Break the Floor hosts conventions in cities across North America, putting on events in hotel ballrooms every weekend over the course of a six-month season. Hundreds of studios and schools from smaller communities bring teams of dancers to the events, branded by Stroming as JUMP, NUVO, 24seven, RADIX and DancerPalooza.
Unsupervised access
Marci A. Hamilton, a University of Pennsylvania professor who founded CHILD USA and is the author of “Justice Denied: What America Must Do to Protect its Children,” said dance is one of the last forums where adults have unsupervised access to younger students.
“Dance organizations create wide opportunities for adults to single out a child, groom them and then get them alone to sexually abuse them,” she said. “The dance world, it’s not like it’s different than any other world, it’s just that they’ve been able to keep their secrets longer.”
Hamilton also said perpetrators in many youth-focused organizations use hotel rooms — away from home — to exploit the power imbalance between teachers and students.
That’s what Gary Schaufeld says happened to him. He was a teen in 2004, assisting a successful tap dancer named Danny Wallace, who wasn’t with Break the Floor at the time but would go on to run one of its subsidiary conventions. Schaufeld had fallen in love with tap at 7 years old, and assisting Wallace offered a chance to raise his profile and learn from one of the best.
One night, Schaufeld said, Wallace pushed him up against the wall of a hotel room they shared with a female assistant and forced oral sex on him.
“I was frozen in my own skin; I didn’t know what to do,” Schaufeld said.
Afterward, Schaufeld said Wallace told him never to say anything; it would be bad for both of their careers. But the secret ate away at him. His mental health deteriorated. He stopped eating and sleeping, and suffered from panic attacks, he said. In 2018, 14 years later, he decided to tell his family, and confront Wallace directly.
Denying allegations
In an interview earlier this year with the AP and the Star, Wallace denied Schaufeld’s allegations and said nothing sexual or physical ever transpired between them, though he said he remembered having an “inappropriate attraction” to Schaufeld.
Schaufeld stopped dancing years ago and has no plans to return to the studio.
“It was my church,” he said, but now “the whole dance scene feels dirty and tainted.”
Televised dance shows brought fame to dancers Nick Lazzarini, Travis Wall and Misha Gabriel, who became big name attractions as Break the Floor instructors. Each of them has since left the company amid allegations of sexual misconduct.
Stroming picked up Lazzarini at the height of his fame to join the convention circuit, teaching hundreds of thousands of aspiring young dancers. In 2019, Stroming quietly fired him after he posted, then quickly removed, a video of himself masturbating on Instagram, as the Star previously reported.
The Star’s prior investigation uncovered allegations that Lazzarini had subjected at least six dancers to unwanted sexual advances at Break the Floor events. Three of these dancers were under 18.
Gabriel, another famous dancer and choreographer, allegedly sent a nude photo on Snapchat to a 16-year-old dancer who says she was so horrified she threw her phone across the room. Gabriel — who has performed with Mariah Carey, Christina Aguilera, Beyoncé and more — was recently removed from the JUMP faculty. His picture and profile disappeared from the website, though there was no formal announcement of his departure.
Sexual abuse pervades the dance world, according to child advocates and industry leaders.
The combination of hypersexual dance content and the close contact between adult teachers and the young dancers creates an atmosphere ripe for abuse, said Jamal Story, a professional dancer who is co-chair of the National Dance Committee for the Screen Actors Guild — American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (SAGAFTRA).
“Professional dancers suffer a wide swath of sexual predation from irritating flirtation to fullout devastating attacks. And what’s egregious about seeing it in the context of conventions is that it happens to kids. Nowhere in the world of education should students feel they are underneath the predators,” he said.