“Captivated” ~ Meet Gina Laurenzi

G: Well, actually I started in Kenosha when I was younger.

G: As a child I took dance for about one year. I was really, really shy around other kids; not at home. My parents just kind of let me do whatever, you know, “You wanna try swimming? Gymnastics?” But then when I was sixteen I had nothing to do and my mom said, “Why don’t you try a dance class again, because you could always dance, why don’t you just do it.” And I said, “Okay, Mom.” And I just loved it, it was like a different world to me. And I quickly became the most advanced in the studio, which really isn’t hard to do in Kenosha, because people don’t keep up to date with the outside dance world. So when I was younger I was the top of the studio and I was like, “Whoa, I’m the best here. This is great.”
Then I graduated from high school and they sent me to Giordano dance center in Evanston to start training there. They felt that even though I started late, they were like, “You can do it, you just need to be shown the technical stuff.” How to hold my arms and things like that. And I went there. And I cried. It was a terrifying experience, because I was the worst. But because I was so determined to be able to do it, I loved it so much, so I kept going there. Eventually they noticed me and they were like, “Who is this girl? Where’d she come from?” Or “Oh, that one from Kenosha,” like “Uh-huh, from Nowhere.” I was like, “That’s not fair. Someone taught me.”
After I got noticed there they moved me to their scholarship program, which is like in the school, it’s not an accredited school, but it’s for pre-professional training. If you’re accepted, they do these big massive auditions all over for their scholarship program and if you get in, it’s a big deal. In New York when they do it there are about 600 people who audition, and then they knock it down to 25 at the end and then tell them, “We want you for the company, or scholarship or whatever.”
So then they moved me in there and I did really well and kept up, even though I was still at the bottom of the most advanced. I was still up there. I kept doing it because I thought, “Wow, look at those people, look at the professional dancers.” Soon enough I was in their second company and then my old company here moved into the YMCA.

G: It used to be Sass Productions, which was on 75th Street. She had moved it into the Y and she had called me and said that they needed me to teach, they needed my personality and I thought, “I don’t know.” When I left I was just getting too busy out there and I wasn’t able to be in charge enough and I thought I had more to offer these kids than other people were allowing me to do. There was like a little power struggle going on. So finally she made me come back and I did come back and then she left the studio and put it all into the Y so that it was theirs. She recommended that they let me take over. Then I was twenty-two.
I decided to move back because out there [in Evanston] I did not like the way that people treated each other. Between the artists there was competition and when you become like you’re all really great and you’re surrounded by all the professionals and everybody’s really good, everybody presents the art form in a different way, then you notice people’s outside behavior just how it’s coming out onto the stage and then it’s just nasty. There’s too many nasty attitudes I was like, “I don’t like this.” So I came back and then I noticed that my kids that I used to have were also experiencing that weird snotty attitude toward each other and they weren’t even great dancers yet. So I decided to abandon what I was doing out there and start my own thing here to hopefully make a difference here; train the kids well, get these good performances going on here so they can get a glimpse of what is possible and not just be stuck in their own little world. Also, to show Kenosha that dance is an art form and to show what these young kids are capable of. With someone guiding them in the right direction; I do train them pretty intensively.

G: At the YMCA? What I do there is, that used to be our studio and now it’s YMCA Dance in general, so there I run their whole program which is ballet, jazz, tap, modern, acrobatic, and hip-hop. Those are the recreational classes. Then I also run New Beginnings. Those are the students I’ve had for a really long time. I have auditions to get more members, or often they’re students who I trained through the YMCA program. Technically it’s YMCA’s, but it’s my baby. Those girls are ages 9 through 18. I kind of picked them up along the way, I had them when they were younger or I just met them and they have the right personality and are willing to work hard. They treat each other like family. They put on the regular performances throughout the year. They train in all of the classes in addition to rehearsals.

G: I think that recently there’s been so many artist who are really adamant about getting the word out there and showing what they have and not really wanting any selfish attention and willing to be friends with each other. And eventually it will all be more connected. People who right now are going to anything will start going to everything. For our shows we like to have live artists, like Mia Riser who’s a friend of mine. We had done a show together and she paints dancers. With a lot of collaboration going on I think that eventually we’ll get looked at not as Milwaukee and Chicago, but Chicago, Kenosha and Milwaukee. It does help to be next to Racine. We have our separate things going on, but they’re growing and we’re growing, so hopefully that can overlap.

G: I plan on staying at least keeping my companies going here. I also have an adult group. That one is Captivate. That’s advanced, pre-professional and actually professional. They’re ages 18 to 27. And it is that dancer who maybe had great potential but then chose to go to school and not pursue a dance career, so they never took it to the next level. So now I’m helping them take it to the next level.