The rush of adrenaline flows through your veins. The smell of hairspray lingers throughout the air. You feel the excitement mixed with nerves fill the air as you’re about to step on stage to perform like you have never performed before. Cheering on your teammates as they are dancing on stage… Hearing your teammates roar for you after our performance. …sitting on stage during awards hoping for a high judges’ score…  This is a dance competition.  

Being a dancer is fun but tough at the same time. One can spend hours upon hours at the studio trying to perfect everything about your dances. According to Vault there are almost 15,200 professional dancers in the world! There are also so many different styles of dance.  For example, Jazz, tap, ballet, hip-hop, acro, lyrical, contemporary, pointe, ballroom, Modern, Salsa, folk, and more.

My personal favorite is hip-hop. I love the upbeat music and the heaviness on my feet. Jazz is another one of my favorites. Jumping and turning shimming and shaking all apart of jazz. To continue on with jazz, you need the shoes for it. There is a lot of different kind of shoes for all of the different styles. For example you would use jazz shoes for jazz. Jazz shoes could have a lot of different versions. Some can be high rise and some can be low rise. You can slip on a pair or you can lace them. Most jazz shoes have a soft and uplifting leather fabric. You could also get jazz shoes in many different colors. The most common color of jazz shoes are tan and black.

Now lets move on to tap. Believe it or not but jazz and tap shoes are built the same way! Tap shoes have a firm heal unlike jazz shoes. Tap shoes have taps on the bottom of them that makes a sound every time you dance.

A lot of people ask if dance is a sport. I think it is because it requires the time and effort of another sport. Dance is a high-injury sport. 1.5% to 36.9% dancers get hurt each month according to National Institutes of Health. That is a lot of injuries! People say that dance is a form of art because you perform. But QuickSteps said “As an art, dance is a form of expression. It is beautiful and alluring and communicates a message. Dance moves require skill, creativity, and imagination, just like any other art.”  So dance could be considered both an art and a sport.

One reason why people don’t think dance is a sport is because you can’t win anything like a game. But you actually can, dancers attend competitions and could win all sorts of scholarships. To different places or for different routines. Also from QuickSteps “As a sport, dance is physically exerting and requires skill from the participants. Dancers even compete for entertainment and prizes.”

As a dancer I have had to wake up at 5:30 in the morning to take convention classes from the judges or the faculty of the dance competition. Those look like back-to-back classes with different teachers teaching different styles. And then those usually end around 3:00 and then I would get my stage makeup on and start to compete.  Competitions can go until 10:00 at night! And then you have you wake up the next day and do it all over again.

So life as a dancer can be hard but I would not be the same person without dance.