Editor's note: In the run-up to Mother's Day this Sunday, WGCU Arts Reporter Tom Hall will be documenting several Southwest Florida moms who have had an impact on their performance-minded offspring.
Coming out of the pandemic, Savannah Hood made a surprising announcement. After playing basketball for several years, she decided to go into competitive dance, like her mother.
Cotrenia Hood confesses to having mixed emotions.
“I was a little nervous, if I’m honest,” said Hood. “I don’t recall any favorable things about dance moms. I felt, omigosh, they’re very controlling and they’re always in the middle of things. And then there was this television show that … really reflected them poorly. So, number one, I didn’t want to be that person for my daughter. I refused to live out my childhood or lost opportunities through my child, through my daughter. I wanted her to go into this experience because she really loved it. And why? I knew how much those two minutes on stage meant to me … It was two minutes, but it was the most empowering and enlightening and inspiring two minutes I ever experienced.”
Hood knew exactly what to do to give her 12-year-old a leg up.
“So I started to look for a studio that was very technical because I knew she had that gap of time where it was important that she caught up to the girls that were performing at her age,” Hood explained. “And so I found a technical studio who focused really on the art and science of movement so that she could catch up really fast. And she was able to do so and make the competitive team.”
A day in the life a teenage competitive dancer is exacting. Savannah is academically exceptional, and schoolwork comes first. But there’s rehearsals from 5 to 9 four nights a week, and rehearsals and competitions on weekends. The latter are typically 7 a.m. to midnight, or later, Friday through Sunday. It’s intense, and Hood's role is to get Savannah where she needs to go, while ensuring that she gets proper nutrition and rest.
As for parceling out advice, she takes a very low-key approach.
“Coming into her own as a young adult going into high school, she wanted to have her own voice … and create her own space,” Hood noted. “So I stepped away, and when she asked, I gave her advice. And then when she felt like she was navigating it and maybe I thought it wasn’t exactly how it could be, I just waited for her to be in a space where she was ready to hear feedback. ”
So far, it’s a winning formula. But Hood is even more excited about her daughter’s future prospects.
“To be able to be in a community of other women and build something amazing and life-changing onstage that shifts things for how people see the world, I’m excited that she has that baseline,” Hood said. “I’m also excited that she loves science and that she could possibly be a doctor one day, or a lawyer or a teacher. I don’t know what the future holds for her, but I’m really, really glad that the performing arts is a part of that story. I am helping her to see the gift that is the arts and how much dance could change her life in ways that aren’t limited to just what happens on a stage. I want her to take those tools into the next iteration of who she is.”
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Cotrenia Hood lives in Naples. She and her husband have two children, Jordan, 27, and Savannah, who is 16. They have been in Southwest Florida for 18 years. Hood is self-employed. She does business consulting and executive coaching through her company, Steel Bleu.
Like her daughter, Hood danced competitively in high school. Following graduation, she joined American All-Star, which helps dancers excel academically, emotionally and physically and, for 20 years, choreographed the pregame and halftime shows for the Super Bowl. Currently, American All-Star hosts summer camps for high schools and colleges, as well as state, regional and national competitive dance competitions that provide junior high, high school and college dance teams the opportunity to dance at the competitive level in an exciting and impartial environment. Hood’s professional career took her abroad and gave her the opportunity to meet “some of the most amazing entertainers and individuals in the industry.”
“The high that I got going on stage I have yet to find a match for,” Hood stated. “I wanted that for my daughter, but I also wanted it to be her own experience."
Savannah Hood dances with Elite Dance Center in Naples as a pre-professional on their competition team. Through Elite Dance, Savannah competes throughout Florida. She and her team “do extremely well, taking home top awards,” Hood notes. Savannah is an 11th grader, honor student, and takes exceptional learning classes.
“Savannah has been in competitive dance now for four years,” Hood noted. “She started out late. She started dancing when she was little, but then decided she wanted to play sports. So we hopped over to basketball. But she always kept a love for performing.”
Hood credits summer camp as the impetus for Savannah’s decision to jump back into dance.
“She’d gone to the camp and said, ‘Mom, you know what, I want to get back acclimated in a group of like-minded people.’ She wanted to be around other girls. She wanted to be doing something she was passionate about, and that she loved, and she wanted to do it with people who loved the same thing. And so she decided, I’m going to go back and dance.”
In spite of her professional background and experience, Hood tried to stay in the background as long as she possibly could.
“I didn’t get to stay there for as long as I wanted to,” she said ruefully. “It started out where she would ask me for advice. Can you look at this routine? Can I show you how it works? Or can you give me pointers? When she first started, it was about a year, a year and half of her asking for help.”
But as Savannah began to rely increasingly on her instructors, Hood gladly receded once again into the backdrop. But then some of the other dancers and their mothers found out that Hood danced professionally and began to seek out her advice.
“Some of the other dancers would come and say, ‘What do you think about this, Miss Cotrenia?’ or ‘Did you see this routine?’ or some of the moms would ask for my advice on next phases for their daughters because they knew that I had done it professionally, and so because others were seeking my advice, then I was a slight bit wiser to my daughter than maybe I would have gotten away with had that not been the case.”
Based on her own experience and that of the professional dancers she’d worked with over the span of her career with American All-Star, Hood knew the importance of proper nutrition and diet.
“My son, who also ran track competitively, was D1 [Division 1] at Syracuse University. So he ran through college,” said Hood. “I share with both of them that their bodies are like a Ferrari, and you don’t put unleaded gas in a Ferrari. So it’s important that she gets a balance of fruits and vegetables. She needs high carbohydrates, low sugar. She needs to be thoughtful about how much she hydrates, and she needs potassium because of muscle spasms. All these different things have to be part of her diet.”
So Hood is careful to pack a lunch for Savannah on school days and provide her with healthy snacks at home and during evening and weekend rehearsals, classes and summer intensives.
More challenging than proper diet is adequate sleep. That’s when the body repairs and rejuvenates the muscle tissue that’s required to do the work of a competitive dancer. Giving the body time to rest and rejuvenate now can add years to the length of a professional career in any sport. The reverse is true as well.
“When you think about girls who have started dancing at 2, the wear and tear on their knees, their your joints, their hips can be debilitating [if they aren’t getting proper rest and nutrition],” Hood observed. “And then there’s transitioning in and out of puberty and all of the things that young people evolve into. And so by the time you’re 23, 25, and you’re just transitioning into stage performance – whether that’s Broadway, as a background dancer for an entertainer or musical theater - and your body’s already worn down because you haven’t preserved it, then your window [as a performer] is even shorter. Although there are anomalies, women who are 25, 27, 30 at max are at the end of a career, and so if you don’t do the work ahead of time, then you shorten that window of professional performance at peak level.”
Cost is another limiting factor when it comes to competitive dance.
“It’s expensive, and the entry into this world limits the amount of young people of color that can do it. It’s thousands of dollars. It’s costumes that you may only wear one time. The classes have a cost associated. The travel has a cost associated. And the competing has a cost associated. And when families are struggling to make ends meet, this is not a luxury that many have the ability to do,” Hood pointed out. “So I often remind her to appreciate every opportunity, that it is not something that is a right, but it’s a privilege, and so don’t take it for granted. Every class, every teacher, every choreographer, each time you get on that stage, embrace every second. Don’t take it for granted because there are so few who have the opportunity.”
As a mother, Hood appreciates the personal growth and development that competitive dance affords her daughter.
“Competitive dance brings all races, creeds, genders into this one space, and they all have this shared love and passion,” Hood observed. “Young people often don’t have the opportunity to see that, to see that we all have a common thread amongst us, or common love or common passion, because our society highlights the division often, not what brings us together, highlights what makes us different. So for Savannah to walk in a room and see boys and girls and everyone from different ages, backgrounds and experiences, all in a room doing the same choreography from the same choreographer, to hip hop and jazz and contemporary and musical theater and lyrical, not just doing the choreography, and not just learning from these great choreographers, but learning the history, learning how that ties together and how it moves us forward into the future, from an Indigenous people to where we are today, is so, so beneficial. Her having that experience with a collective people who don’t look the same, who maybe don’t eat the same food, maybe don’t come from the same country, inspires me and makes me believe that Savannah’s generation and the generations to come will be better equipped in ways that we can’t even imagine.”
Hood describes her daughter as somewhat shy, reserved and “in her head” when she began her competitive dance journey at age 12.
“She entered this space and blossomed,” Hood said. “She turned into this person who could speak her mind and have her own voice and yet be as equally kind and gracious and forgiving and accepting and loving in ways that I could appreciate only because I did dance before.”
Although her daughter is only at the mid-point of a possible competitive dance career, Hood finds that Savannah has already obtained the skill set she’ll need if she wants to turn professional.
“A good competitive dancer understands that technique is only one element of success; that the largest component of being a competitive dancer is passion. I mean if you’re going to compete, I could teach technique all day long. What I can’t teach is passion. I can’t teach heart. You gotta go out there and want it every single time like it’s the first time you’ve ever hit the stage even if you’ve performed that routine a hundred times.”
But there’s more.
“The other element of being a good competitive dancer is understanding that there will be moments when you will be in the spotlight, and you have to own that space, but there will be moments when you’re dancing in a collective of people, and your ability to embrace that and be a part of a collective when necessary is something that enhances you all the more.”
It is also a case of life imitating art.
“Guess what? A majority of life, whether it’s in competitive dance or working for a company, is done with other people. If you don’t know how to embrace the collective, and shine and help others to do so, then you won’t be successful. So those are the two things that I think a good competitive dancer needs to be able to do.”
Passion not only manifests in the energy a dancer brings to rehearsals and competitions but also is a core ingredient in storytelling.
“Competitive dance is telling a story,” Hood emphasized. “If you tell the story well, it will convey whatever message the choreographer intended. And so, I’ll ask Savannah to tell me the story her routine is trying to tell. What are you trying to convey in this music? Is it a war scene? And why are they at war? And what are you saying about this? And how does it end? What do you want people to walk away from this routine believing? Feeling? Seeing? Asking themselves? Did that person really love that person in the song? Or were they really that sad? Or comparing the experience to their own lives.”
One time, Savannah had to dance a song about a young child who’s just lost her father.
“Savannah had not had that experience, but we talked about the loss of her dog. And I said, ‘How did you feel when you lost Nolla? Now convey those feelings in the dance because when you lose something that you love, that is a hurt, a well that can’t be filled easily. And when you’re done, I want you to be able to look in the audience’s eyes and have them experience that again with you, and so that’s kind of the story that I hope a dancer, and Savannah, conveys.”
Hood is also appreciative of all the people who support and make competitive dance and all of the performing arts possible.
“There is an opportunity in competitive dance, in theater, in the arts, for more people to support the work of young people having access. Because I believe that the limitations we are placing in education on the arts and in our world and especially in our nation on the arts is heavily weighted on the fact that a lot of people haven’t had an experience, and so when it goes missing, they don’t know what they’re missing. So take your kids to the free, open air concerts in our town. Watch ‘Hamilton’ on demand. Find ways to introduce the arts to more people. And if you have resources, support young people. We’ll all be better off for it.”
Support for WGCU’s arts & culture reporting comes from the Estate of Myra Janco Daniels, the Charles M. and Joan R. Taylor Foundation, and Naomi Bloom in loving memory of her husband, Ron Wallace.