For the acro/gymnastics duet McKenna Eberle and Nylah Vazquez, their performance at StarQuest was a chance to show off their skills, their creativity, AND creep some people out.
And, frankly, we love it when young dancers take the unexpected route. Anyone can look like a pretty princess or a dazzling diva, but these two young ladies – from Fusion Dance Studio in Buffalo, NY – decided to dress as demonic dolls.
In the routine that the dance studio posted back in 2018, the students performed in the Junior Duet category – specifically in the Acro/Gym Dance group for ages 9-11.
For those who don’t have a tiny dancer at home, StarQuest is a traveling dance competition that visits dozens of cities each year.
It’s alive
As Eberle and Vasquez take the stage, the lights are dim on a little toy box.
The duo each take their places, one sitting atop it, flopped over, and the other leaning against it. After all, they’re dolls, so if there’s no one around to play, then they just sit there, right?
Well, it just so happens that these dolls come to life when the lights go up.
And while it’s not quite Chucky, it’s not Toy Story either.
Dance of the dead
Whatever spirit has roused them is leading them in quite the routine though!
The dancers get up and show off some back-bending skills that made us do a little adjustment and twist – it hurt a little just watching them.
But that’s not all they have in terms of flexibility.
In fact, as they do an even deeper bend facing the audience, they show us that they don’t even need their hands to keep them steady on the floor – just chins!
And then they go back-flipping away, making it all look incredibly easy.
What follows is a series of acrobatic maneuvers in which one girl goes all the way back and the other does a forward handspring over her.
Simple stuff, right? Well, maybe if you’re an undead doll being driven by a mystical force.
Let’s just say you really have to see the video to appreciate how that stunt actually works:
We’re also fond of the double cartwheel – something we no doubt tried in dance class as a kid only to be lucky that we were still young enough to largely bounce back up without broken bones.
It certainly didn’t look like this:
The dream team
Eberle and Vasquez clearly spent many hours learning to work in such perfect unison.
Not only does a dancer have to be able to keep their own rhythm, but they also have to rely on their partner to do the same since they’ll be given the same score.
The young women move together as one unit even when they’re not tumbling around attached to one another.
As the music gets a little faster and darker (like the soundtrack to a hatchet murderer chasing his victim through a forest in a horror flick), the girls begin some serious gymnastics – the kind that requires a running start.
Backflips ensue, but our favorite part is when they take a second to get back into creepy doll mode and then launch into cartwheels.
Many of us attempted a one-handed cartwheel as kids – and many failed – but how about no hands?
As Vasquez manages to bend herself onto the box as Eberle backflips by her, another highlight comes when the younger dancer does her own aerial maneuver off of it!
And she really gets some air!
We love this routine – and there’s much more to it, so we highly recommend a viewing.
You can scroll down below to find the whole video, which we think deserves far more views than it currently has!
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