This weekend, our Company dancers will pack up their gigantic dance competition bags full of sparkly costumes, dance shoes, tights, snacks, glittery hair pieces, makeup, and travel to our first competition of the season. At The Pointe, our competitive dancers attend 4 or more regional competitions each year. Because we are SO excited for our first event that we’ve been working hard and preparing for all year long, we thought we’d create this post to share what it is about dance competitions that we love so much!
- Performing is what we work so hard for! We rehearse our competition and recital routines over and over in the studio, cleaning every count and trying to make sure toes are always pointed – and all of that work pays off with the energy that comes from performing on stage in front of an excited audience. Knowing that we’ll get feedback from knowledgeable judges adds one more level of excitement to the performance. There is no better feeling than walking offstage after giving a personal best performance! In a recital class, dancers usually start working on choreography for our June recital in January. Company dancers start learning choreography before school year classes begin at the studio during our Intensive Week & Choreography Camp – and they perform for the first time in January at our Preview Show. After that, it’s 4+ regional competitions, recitals, and some competitors may visit a National competition in the summer! Company dancers really get a lot out of their time invested in each routine – instead of one performance at recital, Company dancers usually perform each piece at least 6 times throughout the year!
- Cheering on our teammates in other routines is fun and brings our team together! It’s so important for kids to be a part of a team activity – learning to do their best to help their team and support their team when it isn’t their turn onstage. Our young dancers watch and look up to our talented teenagers so much – and our teenagers love having a mob of young kids that are truly their fan clubs! We don’t know any other activity that fosters the same kind of team atmosphere with kids ages 6-18 and their parents than competitive dance! And, honestly, we don’t know any other program that fosters the extended-family-feeling that our Company team has. Our parents cheer on other dancers, even some dancers they barely know, as if they are their own! Our dancers band together to encourage and support every single member of our team – from young ones nervous to take the stage for their first competition or first solo to graduating seniors trying to make the most of every moment in their final competitive season.
- Being with our team! Competitive dance requires a team of teachers, parents, and dancers to all work together to put the best total routine forward. It is so fun to spend time with different groups of dancers, parents, and teachers in between numbers! Our students proudly wear their Company Jackets and have their hair all in the same style – and you can tell from far away that they are all one team together. Our parents wear PSD colors and gear – we’ve gotten comments from competitions before SEVERAL times about our “fan club” that shows up for every routine from the studio!
- A whole weekend full of dance performances – with everyone bringing their best! We tell our competitive dancers that we go to competitions because performing helps us grow, feedback helps us grow, watching other dancers helps us grow, and because it’s fun. Watching performances – from a wide range of different types of dance programs – can be so fun, inspiring, and energizing! We love to see dancers meet new friends from other studios, cities, and even states sharing their love of dance. Our program strives to find a balance – creating excellent routines that are competitive at events without requiring our dancers to be at the studio for 20 or 30 (seriously!) hours per week.
- Results from competing – whether we love them or not – helps us to grow as dancers and as people. Sometimes we attend competitions, have great performances, and our great feelings about those are reflected in our awards and placements (and that’s super fun!). Sometimes, we feel disappointed in our results and learn how to manage disappointment and learn from that experience. Often, a disappointing competition result – when taken as a lesson – can spark the fastest and most intense period of improvement and growth in a dancer! Dance competitions are a great way for kids to learn how to handle exciting results or winning with grace, and disappointment with strength and to manage both with kindness to themselves and others. Learning to navigate disappointments is a life skill that can only be built through experience – and a competition is a great safe place for students to build those skills.
- Learning to problem solve quickly! Sometimes, a dancer gets sick the day of performance and can’t make it and we have to adjust spacing, or the competition starts to run an hour ahead of schedule and we don’t have as much preparation time as we planned, or the prop doesn’t work quite as expected during the routine – and dancers have to rise to the occasion to work together and problem solve right away to make things work. Dancers learn to stay positive under pressure, find a solution as fast as possible, and perform confidently onstage even if the total situation isn’t ideal.
- Watching the improvement in each individual dancer and each routine over the season is incredible. Most choreography for competition was finished before Christmas, then we had our first performance at our preview show in January – and we can’t wait to see the improvements in every dancer for this competition and throughout the season! We get better by performing and listening to feedback, applying it and trying to improve each performance over the last. These dances will benefit from 5 performances before they are performed for the last time at our Recital in June!
Every Sunday afternoon, our studio is FULL of Company dancers in and out of technique classes and rehearsals. We see friendships built between dancers of all ages, and a strong bond formed between teammates who work hard together for the same goal. Our experiences at dance competition help us to grow as dancers and strong, thoughtful, resilient people who know that hard work is the only way to achieve their goals.
Learn more about our positive competitive program at The Pointe School of Dance here! We’re putting together our plans for the 2022-2023 season – stay tuned for more information on being a part of our team if this sounds like something your dancer might want to be a part of.