Dance Fest
A Stepping Stone on the Road to Nationals
By Alexzandra Enger
The competitive ballroom world can sometimes seem like a non-stop cycle of preparing for one competition after another. As one might expect, combining two different competitive circuits only exacerbates that. The intensity of your practice schedule gets turned up to the next level, and frequent flier miles take on a whole new meaning. Instead of being gone at a competition once every other month, I'm now clad in rhinestones and lycra closer to once each month.
Two separate competitive circuits also means that I've got two separate national championship competitions to attend. Luckily, the Collegiate national competition and the USA Dance national competition are almost six months apart, leaving plenty of time to get into the right mindset for each competition. The caveat to that, is while that sounds like a long time, it passes by far too quickly. All of a sudden you realize that in less than two weeks you're getting on an airplane headed for Baltimore, and you feel like you haven't practiced nearly enough, or made anywhere close to the amount of progress that you wanted to. And maybe you, like myself with U Dance Fest in St. Paul, MN, just completed another competition only a week prior, and are just now getting out of the video review doldrums, and into the rapid corrections phase. On the other hand, maybe that close scheduling was intentional.
Normally, when I'm prepping for a big competition like nationals, I like to stop introducing entirely new material and focus on what I already know. That doesn't mean that my partner and I stop with our lessons and drill rounds all day long, though. Usually, it'll involve us reviewing notes from months prior, when we were working on other facets of our dancing, to remind ourselves of concepts and ideas that we know, but might have consciously forgotten. Our coach presents the same information in a surprisingly vast variety of ways, to hit every possible angle from which we can learn it, besides reviewing our footage from practices and competitions, to see what we need to put more emphasis on. Yes, we do run a lot of rounds too. However, this isn't entirely feasible in it's classic form with such a condensed schedule.
In this case, where we had another competition just weeks before, our new learning phase spanned the weekend of the competition. Instead of focusing on cementing our knowledge two weeks out, we were actively focusing the night before, on new or otherwise moderately unfamiliar aspects that we wanted to incorporate for nationals. Dance Fest, while very much a valid competition in it's own right, was a test-run of sorts for Nationals. There's no better similation to practice in for an upcoming competition than an actual competition. Rounds do a pretty good job of building endurance, and prepping you for the fast pace, and crowded floors of a competition, but there's nothing like dancing back-to-back rounds for twelve hours a day, two days straight, in front of a live, almost obnoxiously excited audience (in a good way-we dancers absolutely love it! This is a sport, after all.) to get you into the competition mindset. Dance Fest was perfect for this, as the bulk of the competitors were college students and young adults from the greater twin cities and surrounding states, much like the competition we will be up against at Natioanals. There's no such thing as being over-prepared either. At least the uncountable number of rounds done by myself and my partner, all but ensured that we'd be ready endurance-wise for Nationals.
The next time you're preparing for an important competition, whether it be the famously large Ohio Star Ball, a national qualifier, or Nationals itself, take a look at the competition calendar for your area. A competition will get you excellent floor time, an enthusiastic audience to practice your tango face in front of, and a chance to take a look at the couples you might be up against next. It gives you a relatively risk-free environment, where you can try out new choreography, or work on implementing more dynamic arm styling. What's the best place you could possibly get live-action feedback about your new fancy footwork? A competition, of course. Now, I'm off to nationals, I'll see you in Baltimore!