Pageants and Dance Competitions

Even after talking to my friend, my feelings about pageants began to change even more. When I was talking to her about how she got started she mentioned that the first modeling contest she entered was through a dance competition. Right when she said this it hit me… dance competitions!

I have been a dancer since I was five years old and although my studio wasn’t extremely competition heavy, I have competed in many dance competitions over the years. I couldn’t believe I didn’t see this! I have actually been participating in something extremely related to beauty pageants my whole life and have not even realized it!

At dance competitions you are being judged in a really similar way to beauty pageants. I want to say that its all about dance ability but it definitely isn’t. The night before competitions I had a checklist of things that I would go over a thousand times before I went to sleep, terrified that I would forget something. I had my costumes, black hair elastics, black tights with seams in the back, tan tights without seams in the back, cubic zirconium stud earings that matched the rest of my team’s and about a million other things like that. I would wake up an hour before I had to leave and put on my stage makeup and spend way to much time slicking my hair into a bun and looking at myself in the mirror to make sure I looked just right.
Judges at the competitions are looking for certain skills and tricks in every dance and perfect execution. In most dance competitions each judge has a microphone that they speak into and record on tapes, saying what mistakes they see and what the team needs to improve on.

After a competition my class would sit in the studio and listen to the tapes. Some of the judges were nice and talked more about the class’s strengths as a group while others were dead honest about not liking a dance. A lot of the times judges would comment more on what the group looked like than the actual dancing. Once I listened to a tape of a girls from my studio’s solo dance and the judge’s comments were “I see a hair elastic around the wrist” and “I would like to see a little more clean of a bun next time”.

My studio didn’t really buy into the whole competition thing and if a judge didn’t like a dance we didn’t really beat ourselves up about it. We didn’t try to rack up points with regulation tricks and choreography and for the most part we went to get more practice performing. There was definitely an overlying feeling of nervousness and trying not to get yelled at for forgetting your thick strapped, v-neck leotard. Even though there is a VERY ugly side to dance competitions, I wouldn’t say they’re all bad news and the public definitely does not have a poor view of them.