Whitestone dance students win national awards
Annette Vallone, owner of the Landrum School of Dance – the very first dancing school in all of Queens – has something else to kick her heels about. Two of her young students have won national awards, with benefit of her choreography.
“I’m thrilled,” Vallone said of her newest stars, Gianna DiGirolamo, 13 and Vickie Maglaras 12, both from Whitestone.
“They were each competing against hundreds of girls from all over the country,” Vallone said of the Dance Educators of America
The group was founded late in 1932 by 38 professional dancers in Manhattan as a means of chasing incompetent swindlers from dance school business. By the time of the Great Depression, dancing was one of the few affordable diversions, and wildly popular.
Today, the DEA, as it calls itself has over 300 active member dance instructors internationally (along with a large number of life members) and is recognized as a certifying body for dance instruction. Their Teacher Training Program and certification grants college credits sanctioned by the University of Nevada at Las Vegas.
DiGirolamo earned the title “Miss Teen DEA” – Maglaras, “Miss Pre-Teen DEA” – at the national championships in New York City.
Maglaras also won the pre-teen solo division at the New York Regional championships.
“Each of the girls had to perform both a lyrical dance routine and another routine from musical theater,” Vallone explained.
“I’m so very proud of both these hard-working young ladies,” Vallone said. An award-winning choreographer and former Radio City Music Hall Rockette, she worked out the girls’ routines.
Vallone took over in 1980, from Frances Landrum, one of the 36 original Rockettes. She pioneered the dance school in Queens (originally over the Whitestone Post Office) in 1948. Vallone opened a second location in Maspeth in 1997, at 61-30 Grand Avenue.
“I was just 18-years-old and my family thought I was crazy,” she recalled, expressing no regrets. “It’s been incredibly fulfilling,” she said.
Both Maglaras and DiGirolamo came to the school, at 11-02 Clintonville Street in Whitestone, when they were only three-years-old. “They’re so focused,” she marveled, “It’s been a great experience to see them grow up into fabulous young adults and dynamite performers.”
They aren’t alone as Landrum champs.
In 2007, then-10-year-old Tara Maguire, also from Whitestone, won the title in the “Small-Fry” Junior Miss Division at the DEA national finals in New York, edging out roughly 1,000 aspiring dancers.
“She’s amazing,” Vallone said, “All three of them are.”
