Hearing-Impaired Besonhurst Kid Makes The Nets Dance Team

Vako Gvelesiani is a 13-year-old boy and lives in Bensonhurst. He has two things that make him stand out: he dances better than anyone you’ve seen at the club last weekend, and he is almost completely deaf. And despite this handicap he recently gained a position on the Brooklyn Nets Kids, a troupe of dancing children that perform during Nets games in the Barclays Center.

Last year he auditioned for the dance team. According to the Daily News, the audition call had been answered by 500 kids.

Vako has been dancing since he was two and takes dance lessons from Horizons Dance School (426 Avenue U). The boy is so devoted to dancing that he even studies it in his school, Mark Twain Intermediate School 239 for the Gifted and Talented. He’s already been accepted into the dance program at LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and Performing Arts in Manhattan

The Daily News reports:

Last year, Vako saw the Nets were auditioning kids for a dance team called Brooklyn Nets Kids. He showed up with 20 fellow students from Horizons Dance School, only to discover that 500 other kids had jammed into the practice gym at Barclays Center.

Despite coping with “moderate to severe sensor neural hearing loss” in both ears, Vako made the team. “I yelled and shouted,” he says. “And then I started to dance.”

Vako finally made the cut, along with eight girls and nine boys. But he hadn’t told anyone at the Nets that he was deaf.

“We never told the Nets people that when Vako was 2 he ran a very high fever that made him lose half his hearing,” his dad says. “Or that Vako didn’t start speaking until he was 5. Or that his school teachers wear special FM radio frequency microphones that Vako picks up directly in his hearing aids.”

It didn’t take long for Kimberlee Garris, Barclays Center director of entertainment marketing, to notice that Vako acted a little differently.

“After the third week, we thought Vako was a great dancer but something was, um, off with him,” she told the Daily News. So the family told her that he was deaf.

“It made us admire him all the more,” she said. “Not only was he a great dancer, but he had overcome an adversity.”