The Crested Butte News Serving the Gunnison Valley since 1999
By Dawne Belloise
(Editor’s Note: We have always known the kids that grow up here are special and with this new column that will appear occasionally in the CB News, we will give you a glance at some of the local kids who have moved on from the valley but keep Crested Butte in their hearts.)
—Mark Reaman
Allegra “Pi” DuVal
This 2006 Crested Butte Community School graduate has 18,000 Instagram followers, 1 million Tik Tok fans and her Facebook numbers are over 10,000. She recently hit the $20,000 mark in raising funds on Tik Tok for the program No Kid Hungry with her virtual performances. Like her mom, Heidi DuVal, Pi has been a dancer all her life and these days you can catch online clips of her performance as a professional Britney Spears impersonator, her choreographed act that made her a viral Internet sensation.
She was born in the front seat of a Toyota Tercel in the parking lot of the Gunnison hospital because her parents were held up on the highway due to flooding after a massive rain storm. The police finally let them through when they realized the birth was imminent, but Heidi and Robert DuVal still didn’t make it in time. “The doctor on call was leaving for the day and on his way out, he just scooped me up and ran back inside,” Pi laughs.
Pi says her favorite thing about growing up in Crested Butte was the feeling of a safe community, “Emphasis on community,” she smiles. “The town was a whole family.” In high school, she won a Rotary Club scholarship, the senior art competition and a $25,000 scholarship to attend Arizona State University as a dance major. Pi later transferred to CU Boulder but already a pro dancer and artist, “I felt like I knew what I was doing so I started taking off on my career and have been dancing ever since.”
“Throughout my life I had been randomly told that I looked like Britney,” she says, so when at a Pride Fest, an entertainment company asked her to do a Britney performance in Denver, she costumed up and was an instant hit. The following year, she started her own dance company called Dance is Love. “I started my dance company to speak out about bullying, racism, gender inequality, homophobia and transphobia and domestic violence,” she says and adds, “I also did suicide prevention performances. I’d put messages in my performances using specific songs and to tell a story.” Pi is now booked full-time with her Britney impersonation show. “I get to fly everywhere and see the country,” she states, and her future goal is to tour Europe and she’s already had requests for bookings there.
She currently resides in Norfolk, Virginia. “I live 10 minutes from my mom, so I get to hang out and dance with her all the time.” But she confesses that she misses the CB winters and snow. “CB will always be my home, but I will only go back to visit. My Crested Butte home exists in my head and heart. What I took with me from there that spilled into my life is to do what makes you happy and with your whole heart because life is too short not to.”
Pi will be back in Colorado in December to film a podcast commercial for well-known former radio DJ Larry Ulibarri and she’ll be decked out in her Britney gear. Watch for it across all social media.
