Peak Performance Dance Studio taking Utah ballroom dancing to the ‘next level’
-
- A pair of youth ballroom dancers practice at the Peak Performance Dance Center on Monday, Dec. 2, 2024, in Provo.
-
- Peak Performance Dance Center owner Oskar Wojciechowski (right) works with a student in the studio on Monday, Dec. 2, 2024, in Provo.
-
- A pair of youth ballroom dancers practice at the Peak Performance Dance Center on Monday, Dec. 2, 2024, in Provo.
Between the numerous recreational opportunities and established athletic institutions, there’s no shortage of sporting prowess in Utah County.
But amid the skiing, running and the traditional team sports, one under-the-radar activity that combines sport and art continues to grow.
Ballroom dancing, which originated in Europe and is often limited to coastal cities in the United States, has found a foothold in Utah, churning out dancers who can measure up to professionals from New York or London.
The phenomenon started thanks to the dancing culture in Utah, which, intertwined with a strong dancing tradition for members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, has led to a high participation rate in the activity among youth and young adults.
That’s directly correlated with Brigham Young University growing the largest collegiate ballroom dancing program in the world.
And now, the sport is going to what BYU ballroom director Curt Holman calls “the next level” thanks to the emergence of Peak Performance Dance Center in Provo, a studio started five years ago by former ballroom national champions and couple Oskar Wojciechowski and Karolina Holody.
“Typically these top level ballroom dancers, they’re not setting up shop in Utah. They’re setting up shop in New York City, in Florida or in LA,” Holman said. ” … (Wojciechowski and Holody) did take the step to the next level beyond the educational institution, they took it into the private sector of really developing the skill level at an advanced, competitive level.”
Coming to Utah
Sitting in his office at Peak Performance in south Provo, Wojciechowski laments the low attendance of a particular practice — yet there are still over a dozen kids there on the Wednesday night before Thanksgiving.
They train on one of two dancing floors in the studio, both of which were imported from Holland, doing drills with bands wrapped around their legs and working through various dances with their partners.
With 11,000 square feet, an area where parents can sit and watch and, most importantly, a number of professional teachers who have relocated to Provo from around the world, Wojciechowski admits he never saw this as a possibility when he moved to Utah eight years ago.
“Even though it doesn’t seem like it today, we run out of capacity,” said the Poland native, who moved to the United States in 1991. “Kids come from school, and from four till 10, we are jammed.”
Wojciechowski and Holody found a place primed for success.
BYU’s ballroom dancing program began to gain traction in the 1960s, and by the 1990s and early 2000s, it developed into teaching the specific training styles seen today, Holman said.
In the competitive team dancing realm, BYU regularly places top three in the world, most recently winning a championship in England.
The school also hosts the United States national ballroom championships every year in March at the Marriott Center.
That’s where Wojciechowski and Holody come in. The couple dominated the U.S. championships for several years and frequently returned to Utah to teach lessons at BYU.
Despite enjoying their visits, they never considered moving to Utah until a friend and BYU graduate pointed out there were no private ballroom dance studios in the area.
“He (told us), ‘I think there needs to be some presence of dancing in Utah,'” Wojciechowski said. “‘There’s so many kids that dance. But there’s no one to help develop it, because there’s no teachers here, and there’s no high-level dancers here.”’
After Holody broke her foot, forcing her to stop competing for several months, the couple decided focusing on teaching was worth a try and they moved to Utah from New York eight years ago.
“It was like, if it doesn’t work, we’ll just keep going west, just keep on going to California, L.A. or something like that,” Wojciechowski said. “We had an offer to go to Portland.”
Instead, they found rapid success. They started to help out at BYU and from there built up a group of kids to work with.
The number of kids they were teaching grew to the point where they could no longer accommodate everyone by renting out space elsewhere, so they opened their own studio in 2019.
Growing the studio
Holman has always believed the secret of ballroom dancing’s popularity in Utah County would one day get out and professionals would flock to Utah to teach kids.
Since Wojciechowski and Holody made the leap, that is starting to happen.
In 2020, the couple recruited world-class dancers and Russian natives Alexander Chernositov and Arina Grishanina to move to Utah and become instructors.
Chernositov and Grishanina have a long list of accolades, including as recent as this year when they became the first partnership representing the United States to win the Latin American Dancing World Championship — which they did as Spanish Fork residents.
“We used to come out and train before COVID, maybe once every six months or every five months,” Grishanina said. “But since COVID started, Oskar was like, ‘You guys gotta come over. The studio’s open. You can practice. There are definitely lessons you can teach.’ And back then we lived in New York, so everything was closed. So we’re like, ‘Okay, why not?’ And then we came over. We stayed for three months, and after some long consideration, we decided to move.”
Currently there are 15 teachers on staff at Peak Performance — many of whom are current professionals — and several specialists who are brought in, such as sports psychologists or physical trainers.
It has been a “work in progress,” Chernositov said, to introduce kids to a deeper level of ballroom dancing and the commitment required to grow in the sport, but many individuals are responding well to it.
The instructors are seeing kids learn to treat ballroom dancing not just as a routine social activity but as something in which they can devote their time and in which they can achieve meaningful success.
“It’s been really awesome to see the kids actually get a lot from it because they finally have the information they need and the facilities that they always wanted in order to develop their dancing,” Wojciechowski said. “The kids have been doing so well lately, and they’re just killing it at a national level.”
Going forward, the plan is to keep growing. The studio was extended in April, and Wojciechowski believes the demand is there to build a second studio in the future.
But there’s time to appreciate the progress that’s been made in the last handful of years.
“It’s super exciting that such a small little area that’s Provo and maybe Utah County in general has that high level and high caliber of dancing, which is now becoming known nationwide,” Wojciechowski said. “It’s so exciting to see that happening, because I always saw that that was a possibility.
“The seeds have been planted. And finally it’s coming to fruition, where the kids are actually doing so well on a national level, and on that international level, which is amazing.”
