Dance troupe from Youngstown to perform on BET competition

By Guy D’Astolfo

A Youngstown dance troupe will appear on a nationally televised dance competition show.

Mane Atraktion will perform on “106 & Park,” which airs at 6 p.m. Wednesday. The winner will be determined by online voting.

The five-person troupe consists of Marvin Rushton, 16, a student at Youngstown Early College; Rakia Levesque, 17, Ursuline High School; Jon Green, 16, Youngstown Early College; Patricia Fitzgerald, 17, Mooney High School; and Andre Smith, 16, home-schooled.

Mane Atraktion will travel to BET studios in New York for the live show. To vote for the troupe, go to BET.com, click on the “on TV” pull-down menu, and go to “106 & Park.” Then click on WOW on the menu on the left-hand side (WOW stands for Wild-Out Wednesdays). Rushton said the dance group has been together for a little over a year. “We all met at Hayes Middle School [in Youngstown],” he said.

The troupe has performed at a number of local festivals and was one of the opening acts for the Trey Songz concert in July at Powers Auditorium. In fact, the video from that concert was the one the troupe sent to BET as an audition.

The winner of Wednesday’s competition gets a bag of prizes and is invited back to the championship round.