DB News • June 14, 2021
In an interview with Page Six, former "Dance Moms" cast member Zackery Torres revealed that filming the show was difficult for them—and, at times, harmful.
“That was the first time I really understood what it meant to be bullied into dancing a certain way,” the 21-year-old USC Kaufman graduate said. “I don’t really know whose fault it is. I think we have the system to blame, and I think that it’s something we all need to be aware of and continue speaking out about.” Torres, who is transgender and uses they/she pronouns, first worked with dance teacher and reality TV star Abby Lee Miller on "Abby’s Ultimate Dance Competition" in 2012, before joining the cast of "Dance Moms."
June cover story: Maxfield Haynes: Their Journey in Their Words
Being on "Dance Moms," Torres said to Page Six, limited how they could express themselves and their gender. “There’s a lot of detrimental moments that really kind of set me back as a young person,” Torres explained. “It’s something that we all just need to be aware of. We all grew up this one way, maybe I was bullied into dancing this way … but then stop it there, don’t pass it down to the next generation of young people.”
Torres' experiences on the show aren't singular. In fact, many dance institutions instruct students to move their bodies in ways that reflect a gender binary, and which align with the genders they were assigned at birth. "Men's classes" in the ballet canon, for example (and which separate dancers based on the institution's interpretation of their gender rather than their own), are taught from entry through pre-professional and college-dance levels, reinforcing antiquated perceptions of gender. But dance artists like Torres, who founded the Continuum Community to help make dance education spaces more gender inclusive, Maxfield Haynes (our June cover star) and iele paloumpis (featured this month), among others, are doing the work to activate change.
