A Road Trip to Chicago

Harvest Moon Ball

By Alexzandra Enger

This October, Peter Minkov and Yulia Kornilova created quite the buzz in the collegiate dancesport community. This year saw, for the first time ever, collegiate-specific events come to the heat sheets at the Chicago Harvest Moon Ball Dancesport Championship. As an avid amateur and collegiate dancer myself, I was eager to take this opportunity to experience, firsthand, the competition I'd heard so much about.

That Saturday afternoon, my partner, several teammates, and I packed up our competition shoes and started off for Chicago. We chose to turn our travels into a road trip. We're all from the Minneapolis-Saint Paul area, and aside from a startlingly large dead zone in the middle of Wisconsin, we knew the six-hour drive would be an easy one, especially when punctuated with sleep, NPR, and singalongs.

It was far too late for any reasonable human being with a competition the next day to still be awake when we pulled into our hotel near the Chicago O'Hare Airport, but sleep would still have to wait. Our second vehicle of teammates had yet to arrive, so we waited up several hours more for them. When sleep did come, it was brief. I'd earlier made the conviction to wake up at 4:00 a.m. to get my hair and makeup done, since, as a collegiate dancer on a budget, I was doing it all by myself.

Several hours later, suede soles found the hardwood floors of the competition floor. Cha cha music emanated from every corner of the ballroom; the day's competition had finally begun. In no time at all, though, every rhythm event had been danced, and we found ourselves with hours to spare before our smooth and standard rounds.

Part of our downtime was spent taking the obligatory team and couple photos in front of the competition backdrop and, as one must do at every competition, trying on incredibly elaborate dresses at the vendor booths.

When the time came for the standard rounds to begin, we took to the floor with excitement and powered through to the end of smooth, which was the day's concluding event. As with rhythm, the dances passed by in a blur.

Photo ops followed again, but this time, instead of preparing to dance more, we packed up our costumes, pulled too many pins to count from our hair, and dyed at least four makeup remover wipes per person varying shades of tan, black, and pink. After a very poor re-packing job (it always seems as though your suitcase swells on the return trip), we climbed back into our vehicles and settled in for the long haul back to Minneapolis.

Retrospection from the backseat was not unpleasant—the competition ran on time all day, we had a fun time meeting dancers we'd not otherwise have encountered, and the Chicago-style deep-dish pizza was a hit all around. As an added bonus, almost one hundred issues of Sheer Dance found their way to the Chicago Harvest Moon Ball and were snatched up within hours!

This weekend lived up to and then burst through my expectations. If I ever have the opportunity to compete at the Harvest Moon Ball again, either as a collegiate or amateur dancer, I'll be back in Chicago in a heartbeat.

If you attended the Chicago Harvest Moon Ball or any other competition or performance, we'd love to feature you in upcoming issues of Sheer Dance! Contact us at submissions@sheerdance.com with your questions, articles, and photographs!