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Volunteer Report

By Taylor Wall

In this month's issue, we celebrate competitors who danced at the USA Dance National Championships. You'll also see coverage of MichComp 2016, which represents the end of the competition season for the University of Minnesota Ballroom Dance Club Competition Team, and many other collegiate teams. Of course there are always more dance events to be had, but as the competition season draws to a close, many of us consider reassessing our dance goals, and our dance partnerships to better achieve those goals in the next year.

Ultimately, this article is about that oft-forgotten, most significant, and hardest working volunteer in the entire ballroom dance community, your partner. Aside from yourself, this volunteer has the biggest impact on the success and happiness of your personal dance experience. And they are a volunteer, because no one is making them dance with you.

I know personally how much crap I put my partner, Michael, through, and how he volunteers to take on more work for our partnership every time we step foot out on the dance floor. I've ended practices because I was having a bad day or because I didn't like how our dancing was going. Besides that every time we dance, I trust him to not run me into stuff, and decide what steps we do next (even if they aren't always the steps I want to do).

And, likewise when on the dance floor, I volunteer to take on more work for our partnership as well. Each time we dance together, we are making a choice, volunteering, to work hard to achieve something together. In order for dance partnerships to really work, each party needs to feel like they are doing eighty percent of the work. That's not saying you shouldn't recognize where your partner contributes to making you succeed in your dancing, but rather than focusing on what they're doing, focus on what you bring to the table to make you an enjoyable person to dance with. If you recognize a place where you can bring more to your partnerships (for myself, by controlling my frustration and ending practices when it just doesn't feel natural yet), then bring more to the table.

And it's going to help if we have the same goal in mind. Take some time to consider why you dance, and what you want to get out of a partnership. Even if you are only partners for that one song at a social dance, if one person wants to show off all their flashy moves to their friends and the other person wants to really finesse the technique they just learned in class, that partnership is not going to last. It's going to be really hard to get where you want to go if the person you are going with is running one hundred miles an hour in a different direction. Sometimes, this may mean taking a break from dancing, so that you can come back in focused and ready to meet all of your new goals together.

So, in the end, thank your partners. Recognize that they are doing a lot of hard work for the simple pleasure of enjoying ballroom dance. And they are choosing to do that with you!

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