The Brooklyn Rail

In the pilot for reality television series Dance Moms, a group of young competition dancers and their mothers gather in a dance studio with their teacher, Abby Lee Miller. Better known in the show’s afterlife for her dictatorial teaching style and felonies, Miller introduces herself to audiences by arranging her students in a “pyramid,” a hierarchical ranking based on, in Miller’s words, “behavior, work ethic, attendance, as well as have they followed all the rules.” The dancers, aged six to thirteen, exchange anxious looks with their mothers, who stand in front of posters touting clichéd motivational messaging: “Winning isn’t everything; it’s the only thing!”

In artist Maya Man’s incisive solo exhibition StarPower, we encounter a series of lilac-colored prints that uncannily evoke this stock vocabulary. “Journey Without Fame is Possible. Dance Hard. Life’s Big” reads one of the “Shimmer Quotes” (2026) in bold black letters. The “Shimmer Quotes” distort the motivational poster’s recognizable syntax, scrambling its emphasis on disciplining the body in service of perfection—the “behavior, work ethic, and attendance” that will produce the competition win.

StarPower is Man’s generative, software-based body of work that keenly connects competition dance, social media, reality television, and generative AI as analogous systems of regulation and display. Exhibited at bitforms gallery in Manhattan’s Lower East Side, StarPower engages competition dance to examine the processes of training and performance integral to participation in algorithmic life. Performing identity on the internet preoccupies much of Man’s work, where generative art—created, for example, with code or artificial intelligence—critiques the rubric of “authenticity” through which we evaluate online self-presentation. In StarPower, Man digs into the autobiographical by excavating similar themes from her own background in competition dance. The exhibition demonstrates how competition dance and algorithmic systems train, and ultimately aim to produce, an “ideal” subject who is obedient, humble, and, most importantly, ready to be seen.

In StarPower, it is specifically Dance Moms that stands in for the competition dance world. A show with a still-active fandom hashing it out on TikTok, YouTube, and the subreddit r/dancemoms, Dance Moms is a cultural touchstone within internet memery and one of the few references that non-dance audiences might have for competition dance. Man’s engagement with the show is most vivid in StarQuest (2025), the center piece of the exhibition. Composed of 111 AI-generated scenes, each eight seconds in duration, StarQuest restages dialogue, confessional interviews, and scenes of dance competitions from Dance Moms using text-to-video and text-to-music models. The result is as mesmerizing as it is unsettling. Young girls with sparkly eyeshadow and too-smooth skin tell us they “danced through the pain.” The lyrics of Dance Moms musical classics, like the song for dancer Maddie Ziegler’s solo Cry, are set to different melodies. Movement is both too simple and inhumanly complex: in one duet, a dancer pliés in parallel before leaning forward into an arabesque and spawning another dancer from her own limbs. The duet becomes a trio.

Other work similarly stages exaggerations that only slightly hyperbolize their already-extreme source material. Telling myself and freaked myself out (both 2026) feature quilted prints on fabric of stills from StarQuest. Quilting an AI-generated image, both practices requiring patterning and repetition, makes visible the labor involved in generative processes and complicates the “slop” connotations of AI technologies. In a series of “StarQuest Edits” (2026), Man overtly addresses fandom. Mounted to the wall on a metal panel, an iPhone displays TikTok “fan edits” that remix video clips from StarQuest, layering hazy filters over flashing images of dancers mid-leap or mid-cry. Coach’s Shimmer Warm-Up Jacket (2026), a rhinestone-lettered garment resembling uniforms worn by dancers and dance teachers, is a material trace of Man’s authorial role. She wore the jacket during the live performance-lecture, also titled StarQuest, that accompanies the exhibition, performed at Gibney Dance Studios in November 2025.

Man’s turn to Dance Moms is incredibly effective, enabling a crucial ambivalence in StarPower’s tone. The muddled real/fake distinction of reality TV maps smoothly onto generative AI, social media, and dance, each of which promise some degree of authenticity despite obvious production. The verifiable “real” is less important than the fulfillment of a particular objective or desire, like a sufficiently dramatic fight or a perfectly-executed triple pirouette. StarQuest invokes this premise in its treatment of emotion, a form of currency on reality TV and in competition dance. When the AI dancers break down in tears, we are reminded that such emotional output is carefully deployed in appropriate settings (on stage, when the cameras are rolling) and expected to be contained in others (the dance studio). The exhibition also acts as a container for the complicated feelings that Man or the viewer might possess. Although Man is clearly critical of AI and competition dance, there is an uneasy joy throughout StarPower, an ambivalent recognition that competition dance or watching Dance Moms—of which I was an avid fan—can bring levity.

The autobiographical emphasis of StarPower also opens up new ways of examining Man’s work, which critics have frequently discussed in terms of identity and gender. There is an interesting omission of racial identity throughout much of this writing. Although not the focus of Man’s work, race informs the dynamics of scrutiny that Man explores in online self-performance, and the experience of being mixed-race—an identity Man and I share, as women of East Asian and Jewish heritage—can heighten the experience of racialized objectification, on and off stage. We might also experience StarPower as a racialized critique of the “ideal” subject in competition dance and on social media, where histories of racialized visibility are remixed and performed again.

StarPower puts these complexities into motion—glittering, sequined, and smiling.