Pumping up the crowd
Just looking to get fit, Siren is now in her sixth season.
Wednesday, April 30, 2008
Mindy Van Kuren-Shaw did not set out to become a Siren, she was just looking for a way to get back in shape.
A friend set out to find a dance class for the two of them to join and asked if Van Kuren-Shaw, now 33, had ever considered trying out for the dance team that supports the North Little Rock-based Twisters arena football team.
“Yeah, maybe a few years ago,” she remembers saying. But her friend assured her that, even though you had to be 18 to try out, the team had no upper age limit.
Van Kuren-Shaw agreed to attend the dance clinics held four weeks before team auditions, but wavered on actually trying out for the squad.
“After the first clinic, I was hooked,” she said.
The clinic was more than just dancing, said Tonya Bailey, director of the Sirens and office manager for the Twisters.
“We interviewed them to see how they would talk on TV and radio,” Bailey said. “It was a pretty intense process.”
Bailey was impressed with Van Kuren-Shaw from the beginning.
“I thought she was very cute and very professional. And she was doing a lot of things in the community,” she said.
But once a girl is a Siren she’s not necessarily always a Siren. Each year Van Kuren-Shaw has to attend the clinics and re-earn her place on the squad.
She’s now in her sixth season, but like many of the other dancers, it’s only a part-time job. During the week, she sells advertising and teaches a pilates and yoga fusion class at Powerhouse Gym.
“Most of the girls on the team have full-time jobs or are in school,” she said.
Most of the team is comprised of women who consider themselves dancers and not cheerleaders, she said.
“They don’t want to be called a cheerleader because they grew up in a dance studio all of their lives,” she said.
But Van Kuren-Shaw spent time on the University of Arkansas at Little Rock dance squad and was a cheerleader at North Pulaski High School in Jacksonville, and doesn’t make much of a distinction between the two words.
She considers her Twisters gig to be very much like a professional cheerleader’s job — right down to the uniforms, which she thinks are very professional.
“I don’t think they’re any different from what NFL or NBA cheerleaders wear,” she said.
Though central Arkansas isn’t exactly Dallas, she believes the uniforms are conservative enough for the area, but knows some — one of them being her own mother — would disagree on a few items.
“My mom doesn’t like the red tops,” she said. “And I think some of the other moms on the squad may have a uniform item they don’t like. But I think overall they’re well received.”
Before becoming a Siren, Van Kuren-Shaw studied audiology and speech pathology at UALR, and then studied in the field of communicative disorders at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences.
She worked as a speech pathologist for five years in the Pulaski County Special School District but quit before she became pregnant with her daughter.
Because she was never really trained in a dance studio like other members of the squad, she finds herself spending more time working on the routines.
“I have to practice a lot more than they do,” she said. “We only have required practices on Sunday evenings for two or three hours.”
Between the games and the practices, the schedule can get hectic, but she and the other Sirens enjoy the interaction with the public.
“Most of us just do it for the love of dancing, the love of arena football, and the interaction we get to have with the kids in the community,” she said.
The team is involved with organizations like the Make-A-Wish Foundation and the American Cancer Society.
“The Twisters have a football camp they do with boys, and we have a Sirens clinic that we do,” she said. “We teach them a dance, and they get to dance on the sideline.”
Because of her daughter’s younger taste in music, when she’s at home, she often finds herself dancing to something from Little Einsteins or The Wiggles.
On the field she prefers the “sexy jazz choreography” that is a bit on the vixeny side and a fast and fun country music routine.
More often than not, she likes routines that elicit a response from the crowd.
“I always like to do stuff that the crowd can identify with,” she said. “They’ll be into it, and then we’ll be more into it.”
Comments
Posted by edenfivetoo (anonymous) on May 1, 2008 at 2:47 p.m. (Suggest removal)
she's the best of the Sirens and I'm glad that Sync is focusing on Mindy.
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