Dance Moms Aside: Why Competitions are Good

With the growing popularity of Lifetime’s reality TV show, Dance Moms, competitive dance has become a hot topic in the dance world. The show is a horrible representation of what the competitive dance scene is like, promoting age inappropriate costumes and dances, overly competitive students, and borderline abusive teachers that only care if their students win. Overall, the show is an untruthful production of supposed “reality” life of young dancers, but my largest objection to it is the negative stigma toward competitive dance that it is creating.

Dance Moms personifies everything that is wrong with competitive dance and nothing that is right. Cattiness, competitiveness, focus on tricks not technique and outdoing each other are the only aspects represented and promoted, but they are not the only things competitive dance has to offer.

If gone about properly, competing is a positive and valuable asset to a dancer’s future career.

Oh the glory years... 

To start, competitive dancers often attend many competitions per year giving them more opportunities to perform. The more performance experience dancers have, the less likely they are to have nerves inhibit their performance. Frequent performing teaches you how to best prepare, encourages you to dance better than the time before, and ultimately, helps you gain confidence because you know that you have done it before.

All of these things are crucial to a career in dance where you’re often performing every night with little time to rehearse.

Yes, even rhythmic gymnastics!

As a competition kid myself (the proof is to the right and left!), the versatility needed in competitive dance has been more than helpful. Although I am a ballet dancer now, until I was 15 I trained and competed in many genres of dance: ballet, pointe, tap, jazz, lyrical, gymnastics, and hip-hop (not my finest work). The ability to quickly flip between different styles and techniques has helped me to be prepared for almost anything a choreographer throws at me now. 

Today, it's very difficult to do just one style of dance and succeed—ballet dancers need to do modern, modern dancers need classical technique. The ability to perform many styles as young and as frequently as competitions allow is an unparalleled positive.

Competitions don’t have to be dirty and conniving like “Dance Moms” represents, in fact, most are not. Competitions should not get a bad name because of one poor media representation of them. Competitions are valuable training tools that will help you become a well-rounded dancer who isn’t afraid of anything, not even rhythmic gymnastics!