Juliet Linderman, Martha Mendoza and Morgan Bocknack, Associated Press, Published on Wednesday, April 20, 2022, 6:31 AM EDT
LOS ANGELES (AP) – Every year, one of the world’s leading dance companies sells the dream of Hollywood fame to hundreds of thousands of ambitious young dancers hoping to start a career in television, film and stage.
But behind the bright lights and throbbing music, some dancers say they were sexually abused, harassed and manipulated by the company’s influential founder and famous teachers and choreographers, according to a joint investigation by the Associated Press and the Toronto Star.
The problems date back to the founding of Los Angeles-based Break The Floor Productions; as the company has become a powerful industry, its leaders maintain a culture of sex and silence, according to interviews with dozens of former and current employees and students.
Break the Floor extends in the entertainment industry to some of the biggest names in music, television and social media. Alumni and faculty have danced on stage with Lady Gaga and Taylor Swift, the Oscars and the Super Bowl. Instructors from the company have participated in “Dancing with the Stars”, “Dancing Mothers” and “So You Think You Can Dance”. When the blocking of COVID-19 stopped personal seminars, Break the Floor attracted social media superstar Charlie D’Amelio, whose TikTok account has about 10.5 billion likes, to record training videos.
The company was founded 22 years ago by charismatic dancer Gil Stroming, who became famous in the 1990s by appearing on the off-Broadway show Tap Dogs, described in The New York Times as “beefcake tap-a-thon.”
Break The Floor now attracts about 300,000 dance students, some as young as 5, to crowded hotel ballrooms in the United States and Canada for weekend seminars and competitions.
But in January, while the AP and Star were investigating allegations of sexual abuse against him and others involved in the company, Stroming announced he had sold Break the Floor and resigned as chief executive.
The new owner, Russell Geyser, said the allegations had nothing to do with the current company and that the people involved in the alleged violations no longer worked for Break The Floor. In his first 10 days as chief executive, he said four people had been “released”.
Allegations of sexual misconduct first hit the dance company in October when the Toronto Star uncovered allegations of widespread sexual harassment and predatory behavior by Break the Floor instructors.
The Toronto-born teenager claims that a famous choreographer offered her sex only hours after he sued her at the Break the Floor Congress in 2012. An Ottawa dancer working as an assistant to the company said the same choreographer touched him in public.
Star’s ongoing investigation in partnership with the AP has revealed alleged sexual abuse that dates back to the dance company’s early years and involved Stroming himself.
Stroming is said to have been involved in a series of inappropriate relationships with students in the dance program he led, according to more than a dozen former employees and students.
Four of these sources say that he sometimes took young participants in Break the Floor to parties or corporate events, where they were introduced as his girlfriend. Seven sources say they have seen Stroming interact with students in ways that seem intimate and inappropriate. One employee said Stroming showed him a nude photo of one of the students.
All of these sources spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation and damage to their careers in the cohesive professional dance community.
One dancer said she met Stroming when she was a 16-year-old junior high school student attending one of Break the Floor’s first events with her parents. Stroming was three years older, she said, a magnetic 19-year-old who ran the entire show. At her first corporate event, when she was 17, she and Stroming had oral sex, she said.
A year or so later, shortly after her 18th birthday, Stroming took the dancer to New York, where he told her he had organized potentially career-appropriate dance auditions, she said. They had sex in his apartment that night. The next morning, Stroming suddenly left for Las Vegas and gave her $ 40 for a taxi back to the airport. She says she did not go to auditions and returned home devastated.
AP and the star spoke with the dancer’s father, who said that in the following years she told him about these sexual interactions with Stroming, which upset her deeply.
Stroming rejected repeated requests for an interview. But during an in-service training in 2020, the record of which was reviewed by AP and Star, Stroming turned to his own past bad behavior.
“I was definitely inappropriate in many ways,” he told his staff. “As a student, I was in an inappropriate relationship with teachers, and vice versa, and just looking back I said, oh wow, I think a lot of us don’t even realize in the beginning the power we have in the world of dance. ”
In a written statement, he told the AP and Star: “I was very frank that when I first started the company at 19, more than 20 years ago, there were problems with inappropriateness. He did not respond to specific allegations.
Although not all of the complainants in this story participated in Break the Floor during the alleged incidents, the instructors and managers accused of wrongdoing played a key role in the company’s revenue growth and popularity.
One dance instructor said she warned children and teenagers she leads to congresses today to be vigilant and aware of the potential for abuse of power. About two decades ago, when he was a dance teacher accompanying his students to the Break the Floor event, she said she turned down Stroming’s $ 500 offer to join him in his hotel room.
HIGH SCHOOL STUDENT, ‘CONVENTION FRIEND’
Break The Floor hosts conventions in North American cities, hosting hotel ballroom events every weekend for a six-month season. Hundreds of studios and schools from smaller communities bring Stroming-branded teams of dancers to events such as JUMP, NUVO, 24seven, RADIX and DancerPalooza. The ultimate goal is to win first place in the spotlight at the annual Dance Awards.
In addition to cash prize competitions, Break The Floor conventions – which cost between $ 200 and $ 350 per student – offer dozens of seminars, with gating lights and percussion. They usually end up with parents on the sidelines, photographing radiant children in leotards and make-up, occupying impressive poses with famous choreographers and dancers.
Jeremy Hudson, now a professional dancer, turned 18 and won the “Outstanding Dancer of the Year” at the first JUMP Nationals in 2004. Break the Floor helped start his career, but the alleged attack by one of the star dancers continues. they are chasing him.
At 16, Hudson was looking forward to the weekend reunion. But he was embarrassed when dance teacher Mark Maysmer, in his early 30s, repeatedly told him how attractive he was. However, he accepted the opportunity to help Maysmer as they toured various studios and congresses. A year later, Hudson stayed with Meismer when he joined Break The Floor’s emerging NUVO convention as part of the original lineup of instructors.
“He called me his congressional boyfriend,” Hudson recalled. “I didn’t know how inappropriate that was.”
Maysmer asked the young dancer, then 17, to come to his home.
Hudson said he was optimistic. This may just be his lucky breakthrough in professional dance. After all, Maysmer was already an icon; he was on tour with Britney Spears, Madonna and Paula Abdul.
But the work was not discussed at Meismer’s house. Hudson claims that Maysmer pushed him against the wall and had oral sex with him. Maysmer silenced him, he recalled, warning that someone was sleeping in a nearby room.
In the years that followed, Hudson said Maysmer continued to harass him for sex. In dance studios, Hudson says Maysmer takes him to the cabins in the bathroom for oral sex. On the planes, Meismer groped him in his place, Hudson said. To his surprise, Hudson said Maysmer would buy them appropriate outfits.
“I just didn’t know myself well enough to know how harmful it was,” Hudson said.
Hudson is already a well-known dancer, with an autobiography that includes mega tours with Pink, Lady Gaga and Kylie Minogue, and appearances in more than a dozen films, including “La La Land” and “FAME”. For 17 years, he kept to himself what happened to Maysmer. But after speaking with AP and Star in February, Hudson went public and shared his experience in an emotional video on Instagram, without naming Meismer.
“I took the floor of this choreographer and thought he was helping me build a dance career. Which it really wasn’t, “Hudson said in his video, which has been viewed more than 6,300 times.
The next day, Maysmer was removed from the NUVO website and abruptly left the tour. He is no longer in the company, according to Break The Floor. Maysmer did not respond to repeated requests for comment. His representatives at MSA also said they had no comment on his behalf.
Marcy A. Hamilton, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania who founded CHILD USA and is the author of Denied Justice: What America Should Do to Protect Its Children, said dance is one of the last forums where adults have uncontrolled access to younger students.
“Dance organizations create ample opportunities for adults to separate a child, prepare him or her and then force them to commit sexual violence themselves.”
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