Our “Yabba Dabba Dance” Holiday Showcase and the Holiday Dance Classic competition in Las Vegas, NV, took place back to back, two weekends in a row! What a busy first half of December! And now that the whirlwind fun of the first half of December is done, we can relax a bit as we get ready for the holidays and look back at the last couple of weeks.

Yabba Dabba Dance Holiday Showcase

It has become an Aria Ballroom holiday tradition to give a theme to our holiday showcases. Sure, it’s nice to just do “holiday”… but year after year that can get a little boring. It was some years ago when we started assigning themes to our holiday showcases, and the theme we chose for this year was cartoons. But then one of Aria’s instructors, Lukas, said, “Cartoons? You mean like the Flintstones? That was my favorite cartoon when I was a kid!”

And that was that. In honor of Lukas’s favorite cartoon when we was a kid, our showcase theme became “Yabba Dabba Dance”. Anyone else remember the Flintstones?

The staff worked hard all throughout the month of November to put together a fun and fast-paced Flintstones-themed show for everyone, complete with our very own dinosaur and an appearance by Santa Claus!

We had a group medley performance by members of our Youth Dance Lab. These are our kids aged 8-18 who train three times a week at the studio, and their performance was to music from the Pink Panther. In their performance they demonstrated four dances: Paso Doble, Rumba, Foxtrot, and Jive. Our even younger kids, who we call the “Teddy Bears”, performed a Samba to the song “Under the Sea” from Disney’s “The Little Mermaid”. With all members of the Teddy Bears younger than the age of 8, this definitely counts as our cutest performance. All Teddy Bears dressed up as difference sea creatures. We had four sharks, a pirate, an octopus queen, a turtle, a sea fairy, and three fish! Teddy Bear teachers Lora Tseytlin and Kora Stoynova dressed as mermaids. It was a fantastic performance by our littlest dancers!

Given that we are still in the midst of a pandemic, we were certainly not expecting the turnout that we ended up having. The house was completely sold out, with audience members on a waiting list for seats. As far as entries go, we had over individual entries! We also had 8 solo performances. Some of the highlights included first time performances by Rudolph Balaz with his teacher Natasha Kazheunikava and Christine Kauffman with her teacher Atanas Malamov. Also, Adam Levenson demonstrated his Rhythm dances for his first time with teacher Kora Stoynova. In addition, Teddy Bears Kevin Ma, Lumina Wen, and Jojo Ren performed their Cha Cha and Waltz without partners.

Some solo performances of note were a Pirates of the Caribbean Paso Doble/Tango medley by Maya Tseytlin and Atanas Malamov. But the highlight of the performances was undoubtedly the cabaret demonstration by Adrian Secchia and Gabrielle Smith, the studio’s only cabaret couple. With high-flying acrobatics and death-defying drops, this heart-stopping routine was one of the most exciting performances of the night.

We were forced to cancel three showcases in a row throughout 2020 and the first half of 2021. So it was with much excitement that we were able to host our 2021 holiday showcase. The pandemic certainly forced us to make a few changes to our format. Everyone wore masks off the floor, taking them off only for the time they spent actually dancing. And our restricted number of audience tickets meant we had to figure out how to live-stream the event. This was exciting in its own right. We had showcase viewers from all around the world – even as far away as Japan! If you want to catch up on our showcase or revisit a few of our numbers, you can watch the recording of our live-stream right here!

For some students, though, this was just a warm up. Only four days later, Aria Ballroom’s team of competitive dancers, Team Aria, headed off to Las Vegas to compete at the Holiday Dance Classic.

Holiday Dance Classic

The Holiday Dance Classic is one of the largest dance competitions in the United States. Aria Ballroom has been attending this competition since the beginning. With its prime location at the Luxor Hotel on Las Vegas’s strip, this competition has become a favorite of teachers and students alike. The ballroom is decked out from top to bottom in a Christmas theme, with Christmas trees in every corner and the judges lining the floor in ugly sweaters.

Team Aria having dinner at Tao

But Team Aria doesn’t just attend for the competition alone. Year after year, Team Aria finds something fun to do on the strip. This year, on Friday night, we headed off to Tao at the Venetian Hotel for dinner and then crossed the street to Treasure Island to watch Cirque du Soleil’s “Mystere”. The food was fantastic and the show was incredible, inspiring our dancers on to further greatness!

Saturday night at the competition was awesome. All the main events were squeezed into the schedule on Saturday night, including all four Amateur Open events and all four Professional Open events. Aria Ballroom teacher Lukas Spisak competed in the Professional Open and Rising Star Smooth Championships. The competition was fierce, starting from a quarter-final. In the Rising Star event, Lukas and his partner finished third! What a great result!

The most exciting part of Saturday was watching the Professional Open Latin Championships. This event also had a quarter-final and featured some of the best dancers in the world. Not only were the top four couples in the United States there, but also the reigning Blackpool Champions and prospective World Champions, Troels Bager and Ina Jeliazkova! They were incredible to watch and were such an inspiration to the students. As amazing as they look on the screen, nothing compares with watching them in person. They are truly a powerhouse couple.

Team Aria awaiting their awards!

Our Team Aria students did great, too! Bobbie Childers competed in her first major event with her teacher Atanas Malamov and WON the Dancesport Series Bronze Championship and finished second in the Bronze Scholarship! Rumiko Oswawa, also dancing with her teacher Atanas, won the Gold Standard Scholarship in a final that was populated almost entirely with fellow Team Aria members. And Rudolph Balaz, dancing with his teacher Natasha, won the Top Gold Student award. It came as a surprise and Rudolph was so excited! All in all, it was a fantastic week for Team Aria and a wonderful way to close out the competitive season for 2021. We’re already getting ready for 2022 and we can’t wait for the fun to continue!