ADRIAN — As a competitive dance team, the Encore Dance Studio’s Elite Hip Hop Company is pretty used to being onstage.
But performing in front of the 18,740 fans — according to official attendance figures — who were on hand for the Detroit Pistons game at Little Caesars Arena on Feb. 9 took things to a whole new level.
The opportunity came about because the Elite Hip Hop Company’s teacher, Encore instructor Isabella Luppo, is also a member of the Pistons Dancers, the dance team that performs at every Pistons home game and at various community events.
Luppo — whose mother, Ashley Palmer, is the dance studio’s founder — decided to audition for the Pistons Dancers during her freshman year of college three years ago. “I figured I had nothing to lose” by trying out, she said.
Becoming a Pistons Dancer means making it through an intense two-day audition process that whittles 100 or 200 applicants down to just 18 — and a dancer must re-audition each year. Dancers have to be masters of multiple dance forms and “we’re constantly learning a new dance,” Luppo said.
Her connection to the Pistons opened the door for her dance team from Encore to be among those performing at the Feb. 9 game. In all, she said, 170 young dancers were part of the event.
For her, it was an opportunity both to showcase what the Elite Hip Hop Company can do and for her students to see her at work as one of the Pistons Dancers.
“It felt so surreal, because both of my worlds were colliding,” she said. “It was just a full circle moment.”
The Elite Hip Hop Company is one of Encore’s multiple competitive teams in a variety of dance disciplines. Its current members come from several areas of Lenawee County and from Archbold, Ohio, and range in age from 9 to 17.
Luppo said her young dancers had a fair amount of nerves prior to their big moment at Little Caesars Arena. But “I kept telling them they’d worked so hard and it was time,” she said.
The two-and-a-half minute routine, which Luppo choreographed, earned a great response from the crowd. Afterward, Luppo’s fellow Pistons Dancers came up to her to congratulate her, and the team’s announcer told her how proud he was of what she and her dancers had accomplished.
“It just fills my heart with so much happiness and joy, for the kids to have had that experience with me, with my mom, with the parents,” Luppo said.
Palmer said that to her, not only is it “cool” for the Lenawee County community to have a professional dancer as one of its own, but for the students to see their teacher plying her craft at the game showed them firsthand that there are opportunities in the professional dance world.
“I think it really inspired them,” she said.
In fact, for at least one of the youngsters, it did exactly that. “One of my kids came up to me afterward and told me she wants to audition for the Pistons,” Luppo said.
