Seven years ago in a crowded Randhurst Mall, a 9-year-old girl stumbled across her life’s ambition.
“My mom describes this the same way every time,” said Latin dancer Stephanie Smolen. “We accidentally came across a ballroom dance studio. I had been doing ballet since I was three, but it was nothing like this. I pressed my face against the window and this girl was wearing this really sparkly dress. So I was like, ‘I want to wear that, I want to dance like that.’ I begged my mom for months and finally she let me do it. I tried it once and fell in love with it.”
Soon, Smolen was enrolled in a group class. According to Smolen, after about a month, the instructor approached her mother and told her she could not be in the class anymore.
Her daughter was too good.
Smolen left the class and, after trying several other options, found her current coach.
“The first time I saw her, I noticed her heart was so into it,” said Smolen’s coach Max Kholostoy. “She wanted it so bad. I remember that first time she came in to do a trial. When she stepped on the dance floor, she had to make it work. She had to make it perfect. Everything just made sense for her. From that first impression, I realized that this girl needed to dance. She needed to be out on the dance floor.”
In fact, before she ever stumbled across that ballroom dance studio in Randhurst Mall, Smolen’s desire to dance landed her in the hospital.
“I would come home and practice two or three hours a day because I was so into [ballet],” said Smolen. “In the middle of our living room we had a rug and a coffee table. I would just practice spins around that coffee table. Spins, spins, spins for hours. Completely by accident, I slipped on the rug and smashed my head on the corner of that coffee table. It went right into my eyebrow. I got up and thought it was just a bruise. You know how sometimes you get hurt and it’s just a pulsing bruise? So I got up and went to my dad and asked for some ice. At the time, I didn’t know half my face was covered in blood. He looks at me, freaks out, picks me up and calls my mom. She gets out of the shower, sees me, then slips and falls and twists her ankle. So he’s holding me, a bloody five-year-old in one arm, and my mom with a bad ankle in the other as we walk into the hospital.”
Today, Smolen focuses her work ethic on Latin dancing, which is composed of five different styles of dance: cha-cha, samba, rumba, paso doble and jive.
“Each dance is a different story,” said Smolen. “Rumba is the slowest one. That’s telling a love story. But cha-cha is sometimes called the ‘cheeky cha-cha’ because it’s supposed to be the sexy one, where the girl is kind of flirting with the guy and the guy is trying to get the girl. You have to have some kind of chemistry to be able to portray those characters and show the story. The judges have to see that you can portray those characters without hesitation on the floor, and then when you get off the floor, it has to seem like nothing ever happened.”
Smolen’s dancing career has sent her all over the country. Most recently, she and her partner Matt Kubak competed in New York this past January. Because Kubak is turning 19 years old, the pair had to “dance up” in the Amateur Adult division.
“They could be dancing against 30-year-olds that will run circles around them,” said Kholostoy. “It’s like a kid coming out of high school playing in the NFL.”
To their coach’s surprise, Smolen and Kubak placed in the top 24 in the pre-championship round. Since this was the first time the duo danced in the Amateur Adult division, finding space on the dance floor among the other 11 couples was even more difficult than usual.
“Multiple times we were dancing next to another couple and we just couldn’t do anything about [the space],” said Smolen. “One time, a girl went into a spin and elbowed me splat in the face. Matt looked at me and I just said, ‘Keep going, keep going,’ because you can’t stop. It shows weakness.”
According to Kubak, this attitude is typical of his partner. He said it is also what separates her from everyone else.
“She has the potential to be one of the best in the world,” said Kubak. “Her passion for dancing is unbelievable. It didn’t work out with my previous partners because they knew they were going to stop eventually. She wants to do it for the rest of her life. She’s that motivated, that hungry to dance. She wants to get to that level where she’s in front of the world.”