StarQuest: Dance Moms and Performing Online
Plus a one-night installation and performance on November 18th in NYC!
My new generative-AI “reality series,” StarQuest, premieres next Tuesday, November 18th in New York City with an installation and performance-lecture at Gibney: Agnes Varis Performing Arts Center downtown, co-presented by Triple Canopy and Feral File. Free with RSVP here.
StarQuest, produced completely with generative AI models, is a body of work that takes up the tropes and aesthetics of American competitive dance, specifically drawing on my own experience growing up as a competition dancer and the cult reality television series Dance Moms.
StarQuest, my online solo exhibition with Feral File, opens next week on Thursday, November 20th at 12pm ET.
This work first began with an essay that I wrote for Not Here to Make Friends zine, out now in Issue 3. I’m publishing the essay for the first time online, with IMAGES (screenshots of mine), below. Please read on if you’re interested…
xoxo,
Maya
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StarQuest: Dance Moms, Social Media, and Abby Lee Miller as The Algorithm
Winning isn’t Everything, It’s the Only Thing! exclaims the bold, framed, red and black poster that hangs on the dance studio’s walls. Similarly styled phrases ornament the mirrored room at every angle: If You Work as a Team, You WIN as a Team! If you Make a Mistake - Admit it. Learn from it. And NEVER repeat it. The camera hovers over six small girls, each outfitted in bright, two-piece dancewear, as they twirl across the screen. It is 2011, and this is the pilot episode of Dance Moms, a Lifetime reality TV-show that invites viewers inside the glitter and drama of the high-intensity competition dance world.
Dance Moms revolves around tyrannical dance coach and choreographer Abby Lee Miller, who runs her eponymous dance company out of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Every week, Miller, the “dance moms,” and their daughters, journey to a new dance competition to show off a set of rehearsed routines in hopes of winning their category’s highly coveted first place award. There are four moms and six daughters in the original cast: Melissa with Maddie and Mackenzie, Christi with Chloe, Kelly with Brooke and Paige, and Holly with Nia. As I read this list of names, I hear Abby Lee Miller’s voice screaming them, her pointed finger waving in sync with every admonishment.
This is how a classic episode plays out. Picture you are watching at 10x speed:
Abby presents her loathed “pyramid,” where she ranks the girls by taping up their headshots in a tiered formation. Maddie is at the top, AGAIN. Cue talking-head shots of the non-Maddie mothers complaining. The company rehearses a new set of dances for this week’s competition titled something along the lines of “Starpower,” “Starbound,” or “StarQuest.”
When the weekend arrives, the girls are done up in fake eyelashes, rhinestone earrings, sheer tights, and shimmering two piece costumes. The girls perform. The moms argue. A dancer is injured, hurting, or sick. She cries. She is told to stop crying. The team does not perform as well as Miller had hoped. She makes the girls feel ashamed. The team returns to Pittsburgh.
I am away from my computer, so the next episode starts playing automatically, and the cycle repeats again.
Like so much reality television — but especially those on Lifetime in the early 2010s—watching this show inspires a mixture of intrigue and horror. It’s a car crash happening in slow, sparkly motion: gleaming glass flying through the air with every aerial and high kick. The show’s meteoric rise in popularity can be attributed to how it showcased true talent alongside the theatrics endemic to docuseries dramas. When Dance Moms first aired, the dancers, all young girls, were between the ages of six and thirteen. This gives an uncanny quality to their interspersed “talking head” interviews. I imagine the adult interviewer as a ghost in the machine implied behind the camera, puppeteering the dancer with leading prompts. “I love dancing, but I don’t want to go on Broadway. All I want to do is stay home and eat chips,” confesses Mackenzie, age six, in an interview during Season 1 Episode 4.
Unlike other reality television shows that focused on adults, Dance Moms immediately appealed to kids— especially to those like myself, who danced in a competitive company. Like the girls on Dance Moms, I grew up in Pennsylvania. My hometown, Mechanicsburg, sits at the center of the state, well outside the radius of any possible cultural bleed from Pennsylvania’s two biggest cities. I spent nearly every night after school at my local studio, training in classes ranging from ballet to jazz to hip hop. I watched myself grow up in the studio’s floor to ceiling mirrors. I wanted so badly to be good, but even more than that, I wanted so badly to be liked.
Dancers are trained to hold their bodies with the expectation that they will be perceived and judged. As performers, they develop a cybernetic relationship between themselves and their audience. Success on stage, quantified as a high scoring routine, means that the dancer not only performs an impressive set of complicated tricks, twists, and turns, but that she also makes it look both effortless and beautiful. A dancer’s energy should be magnetic on stage.
She should be charming.
She should be smiling!
These are guiding principles in the world of competition dance. These are also guiding principles in the world of social media.
I often wonder if this is why I felt so comfortable when I first started posting online. Initially on YouTube, then Facebook, and eventually, Instagram. The sense of performance that these platforms encouraged, the quantifiable feedback delivered in the form of likes, comments, and followers, felt natural to me. It was a familiar experience, to operate in anticipation of judgement. Posting felt like performing choreography.
This has been widely recognized as a feminine-coded experience; in Ways of Seeing, John Berger declares that, “A woman must continually watch herself. She is almost continually accompanied by her own image of herself.” In Dance Moms, Abby Lee Miller often encourages her preteen dancers to adopt this mindset. Under harsh fluorescent lights, surrounded by floor-to-ceiling mirrors, she reminds them that “when you’re on that stage, they’re all watching you,” and that “the judges see everything from your head to your toes.” In a notebook I kept during my first year of high school in 2011, a doodle of mine reads “DANCE like everybody is watching.”
It is traditional for dancers to begin training and performing at a young age, usually in the single digits. I started taking ballet classes at age three. It is impossible for me to remember the first time I ever stepped on stage, just as I cannot remember the first time I saw myself on screen. Imagining myself being watched and adjusting accordingly has always felt like a condition of living for me, rather than a discrete experience traceable to any specific source. “I’m a perfectionist,” star Dance Moms dancer Maddie Ziegler, who today maintains 13.2 million followers on Instagram, repeats in interviews throughout the show. When success within a system relies on your ability to contort your own body to adhere to an impossible paradigm, how can a young dancer be anything else?
The imposed pursuit of perfection comes up often in descriptions of the “young girl’s experience.” In Tiqqun’s controversial text, Preliminary Materials Toward the Theory of the Young-Girl, they declare: “THE YOUNG-GIRL RESEMBLES HER PHOTO.” They push on,
“Insofar as her appearance entirely exhausts her essence, as her representation does her reality, the Young-Girl is that which is entirely expressible, perfectly predictable, and absolutely neutralized.”
The ideal competition dancer operates like a virtual simulation, performing her routine flawlessly over and over again. Her ability to execute this performance constitutes her “essence.” Kendall Vertes, a dancer who enters during Season 2 of the show, confesses, “I feel so much pressure to get it perfect, every single time.”
Over the past several years, social media platforms have been scrutinized for damaging teen girls’ mental health. In February of 2023, The New York Times reported on the CDC’s findings that “America’s teen girls are engulfed in a growing wave of sadness, violence and trauma.” Searching for a cause in this spike in “teen girl sadness,” many point to social media as the primary source to blame.
Re-watching Dance Moms now (and to a small extent living Dance Moms before), I wonder if this attitude too conveniently positions social media as a scapegoat. Is social media causing this issue or rather exaggerating a pre-existing cultural concern? The way many people feel using social media aligns with the way young girls, and more precisely competition dancers, are conditioned to feel early on in their lives. I have been chasing perfection inside and out long before I logged on to any platform.
In the second episode of Dance Moms, titled “Wildly Inappropriate,” Miller choreographs a dance to the song “Electricity.” When she reveals the girls in their costumes, the mothers stiffen, commenting that it looks “too sexy.” “They look like prosti-tots,” says Christi, Chloe’s mom, in a talking head interview. When Miller asks Chloe about the costume, she replies “I love it!” and strikes a pose.
To many adults, these costumes and the routine’s choreography clearly over sexualizes this group of preteen girls. But to the girls, it’s pure fun. As they dance, dutifully performing choreography that includes butt slapping and the repeated, synchronized opening and closing of their legs, a pop singer coos over the soundtrack: “Can you feel it? Can you take it? Baby it’s so electric, so come and play with me.”
“My Maddie doesn’t even know what sexy means” insists the eight year old’s mother Melissa, “she just is dancing cute and shaking her little butt, and she just enjoys it.” Is it possible to love something and recognize how it is harming you at the same time? In her essay “Britney Spears Was Never in Control,” Tavi Gevinson writes,
“Even young women who are not megafamous have typically picked up on what makes them appear valuable by the age of 15. Their capacity to perpetuate these standards doesn’t mean they are not also victims of these standards. If anything, it shows how girls’ bodies and sexuality are so deeply regulated by a society that despises women and fetishizes youth that some of us learned how to carry out its work all on our own.”
When I was fifteen years old, I saw dance as my greatest passion, a self-motivated pursuit that I earnestly enjoyed. I felt like an athlete in my sequinned-skirts and jazz shoes, not a showgirl. But now that I am older, I see how blurry the line between those two categories became in the competition dance universe. Thinking about it in hindsight elicits a sense of shame, rooted not specifically in the costumes, choreography, or pop song soundtracks, but in the way this slice of my biography clearly exposes me as a “girl.” A label I quickly learned situates itself in direct conflict with my desire to be perceived as “smart.”
In high school, I posted a picture to Instagram of myself performing a solo on stage at StarQuest dance competition. In it, my hands stretch my leg up to my head, positioning my body in a standing split. A friend of my boyfriend at the time photoshopped my boyfriend’s face between my legs and sent the altered image around to him and his friends. They showed it to me and laughed. I told myself to laugh with them too.
Despite my genuine passion for the pursuit, with over a decade of distance from my last dance competition, I now clearly see how that environment taught me to render myself consumable. It trained me to recognize that there was not power, but capital, to be gained as an object of desire. It groomed me to be the perfect social media user: one who can post and make it look effortless, seamlessly embodying the performance qualities required of the online stage.
Already, many parallels have been drawn between the experience of girlhood and being online. In Alex Quicho’s Wired essay “Everyone Is a Girl Online,” she asserts,
“To wish to be perceived, desired, and rewarded for cultivating that desire is the default setting for participating in digital culture, making all of us ‘girls online’ regardless of gender.”
“The Algorithm” makes us all “competition dancers” online regardless of skill. As I scroll, I see every person I follow aiming to post with perfectly pointed toes and eye-catching grand jetés.
It’s been over a decade since the end of my competition dance career. Rewatching Dance Moms, I now see Abby Lee Miller as “The Algorithm” itself. Colloquially, people use the phrase “The Algorithm” to refer to software-based systems that choose what content rises to the top of social media feeds. Miller punishes her dancers for any performance imperfections. She reminds the girls to “smile at the judges.” She ranks her dancers in a pyramid formation every week based on a mysterious mixture of behavior, competition scores, appearance, and attitude. She entices them with the potential future of “becoming a star.”
Social media is StarQuest Dance Competition, rendering its user an aspiring star performing her solo on stage. Picture her: arms outstretched, reaching for the top of the pyramid. Pirouetting forever. She spins on her toes in an infinite loop on screen.
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