(WTNH) — On tonight’s Nyberg, champion ballroom dancers.
14-year-old Ariel Mayer is from Guilford while her dancing partner, 25-year-old Daniel Burke, is from New York.
Mayer is so engrossed in her dancing that she is being home schooled in a variety of ways so that she can travel to her competitions. Together, they are lighting up the dance floor all over the country.
“We competed in a number of different categories of events,” explained Burke. “We have single dance categories and championship categories and scholarship categories so we [have] taken home, at this point, probably hundreds of single dance awards.”
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For Mayer, being on the dance floor is an incredible experience.
“It is my passion, my love,” she said. “Right now, I really just want to keep going with it because when I’m on the floor, really all my problems just melt away and I’m truly not thinking as much about the steps that I’m doing cause we’ve trained them so hard that what you have to be is in the moment and you just get to perform and have fun…Since performing and dancing and just grooving out to music, it’s what I love to do. It’s a great pleasure.
“What you see is both the training of the character of the waltz of the dance which is an old European socialite dance, explained Burke. “It’s a chance of etiquette.”
“Ariel brings a youthfulness to it and the maturity that represents the dance as a professional would do it,” he said.
When asked how she felt about the cha-cha, Mayer responded, “I love all dances for sure. It’s one of my more challenging dances that I really have to work on, but it doesn’t mean that I like it any less.”
