Courtney Washington Is Ballroom Fierce. Next, She Tackles Modern Dance. | UNW

“Usually, when I walk in rooms, people are afraid of me,” the choreographer Courtney Washington said recently.

She was talking outside a Manhattan rehearsal room where members of the House of Juicy Couture, the vogue family and team that she founded in 2009, were preparing for a ball.

“You see, they’re playing in there now,” she said. “But when I go in there, they’re going to tighten up. When I walk into a studio, I don’t want to play. I want to work. They better be ready to work.”

Sure enough, from the moment Washington entered the studio, she was all business — organizing, coaching, correcting.

“That was safe,” she told one dancer.”

“You’re probably giving your all, but you have to give more.”

“You are being hunted. If you are in Juicy, people are so happy to beat you.”

Although Juicy is a kiki house (more junior), it vanquished many established houses to win the third season of the HBO ballroom competition “Legendary” in 2022. Juicy’s notable alumni include Honey Balenciaga, who danced on Beyoncé’s Renaissance and Cowboy Carter tours; and Baby Byrne, now appearing on Broadway in “Cats: The Jellicle Ball.” That kind of success is part of what has made Washington, who is also East Coast Mother of the House of Balenciaga, a highly respected — and yes, feared — figure in the ballroom scene.

Washington, 40, also has a reputation as a tough-to-beat choreographer in street-dance competitions. She led a team called the Pretty Kitties for about 10 years. “We lost like 10 times,” she said, pausing, “out of a thousand.”

Watch some videos of the Pretty Kitties, and it’s easy to see why they dominated. Washington’s choreography is bewilderingly dense with ideas, wit and ever-morphing formations with transitions that are at once perfectly meshed and surprising. The vocabulary borrows from vogue, house, hip-hop — up on the latest steps or calling back across decades. The execution is energized and exact.

Washington’s dances for her current group, Masterz at Work, are even more impressive, as audiences have seen at the Guggenheim Museum and the Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival. And now she has taken a new step, creating her first work for an established modern dance company, Parsons Dance. The piece, which will have its debut during the company’s two week run at the Joyce Theater (April 29-May 10), is called “Fearless.”

WASHINGTON GOT HER START early. Growing up as one of 10 children in a Brooklyn family, she learned dances from her godmother and her older sisters. She had been assigned male at birth, and her mother pushed her into sports, but she had little interest in that. Dancing was her thing.

On her block in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood, dance battles were common. When Washington was about 8 years old, one of her sisters was losing a battle and called for her help. “Everybody was instantly like, ‘Oh my gosh, you’re so good,’” she recalled.

The teens on the block taught her not just steps, but how to put them together. “It was like teaching me how to swim,” she said. She was a quick study, and soon she was making up routines for a group of kids her age. They called themselves the Little Destroyers.

But when she was 16 and 17 and beginning her gender transition, Washington’s feelings about herself changed. “My mind didn’t match my body in ways that were uncomfortable,” she said. “I had to go through the steps of not feeling pretty, not feeling cute.” She stopped dancing.

A few years later, though, a child she used to babysit asked her, “You don’t dance no more because you’re a girl?” Expressed like that, it didn’t sound like a good reason to avoid doing what she loved. Washington took up the child’s request to teach her routines. She knocked on the doors of the neighborhood kids she used to know and formed the Pretty Kitties.

“We were so popular, they used to have pictures of us in the pizza shop and the corner store,” she said.

Brian Starke, a member of Masterz at Work, recalled being in a rival dance group and coming up against the Pretty Kitties at a competition. “I had never seen anything like it before,” he said. “Super fast, super clean. We didn’t have a chance.” Starke switched groups.

“Courtney’s eye for detail is unmatched,” he said. “We always joke about how if your pinkie is in the wrong place, she’s going to stop the music and make us start over.”

But there is more to Washington than precision. “Courtney’s pieces resonate because they come from her experiences, from her living an authentic life,” Starke said. “And she knows how to keep us all together like a family.”

As she led the Pretty Kitties, friends pulled Washington into the ballroom scene. “I feel like they had a purpose for me, because I learned a lot of self-worth that I never would’ve had otherwise,” she said. “I have a place and other people like me.”

Washington’s main vogue category was “face,” in which contestants are judged on their facial beauty and how they frame it. “People called me the Burnt Cookie,” she said, and that became her Instagram handle.

While Washington was developing the House of Juicy Couture, the Pretty Kitties morphed into Masterz at Work and continued to dominate. But Washington eventually tired of competing. Masterz started doing showcases and videos and “more artsy things that felt good to the soul,” she said.

Then she came to the notice of Duke Dang, the executive director of Works & Process, which supports artists with fully funded residencies and presents them at the Guggenheim Museum. This was in 2021, when Dang was organizing “bubble residencies” with strict Covid-19 quarantine and testing rules, and preparing for a return to live performance. Dang arranged for a residency for Masterz.

“We were following the guidelines and telling artists that their works could be no longer than 25 minutes,” Dang said. “And Courtney told me that she had never created a piece that long.” Her first 25-minute work, “All Inclusive,” debuted at the Guggenheim that March.

A second Works & Process-sponsored piece led to several bookings. It was at the Fire Island Dance Festival in 2023 that Parsons Dance, also on the program, first saw Washington’s work: a knockout number for five dancers in pink suits moving on and off chairs to a track repeating the “I am sitting” opening phrase of Suzanne Vega’s “Tom’s Diner.” The Parsons dancers wanted some of that fun for themselves.

“Masterz is known for their high energy, which is actually very similar to what we’re known for at Parsons,” Megan Garcia Ziminski, a company member, said. “Courtney really challenged us, because every single movement has an exact count and all the formations require so much attention to detail, but she also did an amazing job pulling from our strengths.”

One of the first things Washington asked the Parsons dancers to do was improvise or freestyle one at a time. “And she took some of her favorite things from what we did and created solos for us,” Garcia said.

David Parsons, who co-founded his company in 1985, has a longstanding practice of supporting younger choreographers — dozens of them over the years, including Robert Battle, who went on to direct Ailey Ailey American Dance Theater.

“I learn a lot,” Parsons said. “I want to be there with younger people and new ideas that keep me alive and moving forward. Courtney is a very good artist.”

Starke, who assisted Washington as she was making “Fearless,” was reflective about the process: “For us there’s a risk in putting our movement onto new bodies. Our movement comes from a culture, and you have to have a deep understanding of what the culture is.”

But with risk comes potential reward. “I told Courtney, ‘This is going to open doors for you,’” Dang said. “We’ve seen this before: A choreographer like Courtney comes into the concert dance ecosystem and all of a sudden other companies see the work and start calling.”

Washington said that she used to avoid working with dancers other than her own. “People would ask me to clean their pieces up, and I would say no,” she said. “But then it became a job, and I didn’t need the shield of my dancers, so when Parsons called me, I was ready to go in there fearless.”

“Every step,” she added, “gets me to the next step.”