Competition Dancing Remix!
December 6th, 2007 | by lissie |Well we’ve decided to get back into competition in ballroom dancing aka Dancesport. We danced our last competition in February 2007 a the Masters Games in Wanganui, New Zealand. Officially we quit because we were going overseas, but as far as I was concerned we quit because we weren’t having fun competing anymore. We still enjoyed dancing and we continued to improve but we had got totally over competing, after nine years we had had enough.
For those of you not familiar with Dancesport let me explain the judging system in Dancesport. Each event has somewhere between 1 and 5 dances and 3 or more judges, but always an odd number of judges. In the events we dance its ether 1 or 2 dances. Each dance is on for 1.5minutes, maybe 2 minutes for a final. There can be up to 8 couples on the flooor at a time (depends on the floor size). In a round the judge has to mark a certain number of couples back to the next round or final: so out of 8 maybe 6 back to a final. In a final each couple is ranked from 1 to 6 (or however many couples are on the floor) . The couple with the most recalls get to the next round, the couple with the most “1’s” in the final wins, its a marking system called the “Skating System“.
The result is that each judge only has a few seconds to mark a couple through or rank them in a final. That’s why you get the whole OTT thing happening with hair, costume, makeup etc. You’re see very few pastel dresses on the floor, bright colours attract the eye, anything that works for the peacock works in Ballroom Dance!
Why did we get out dancing competitively:
- we regularly danced competitions when there were only 3 judges on the floor at a time with either 2 of those 3 being new/inexperienced judges, or 2 of the judges were married / partners.
- we came second in a 2 couple event when the other couple danced the whole cha cha out of time. The experienced judge marked us to win but the 2 newbies assumed that the other couple who were normally better dancers and were definitly skinner should win.
What’s changed our mind about competiting:
- local competitions in Perth have no less than 7 judges on the floor for each event, and couples can’t judge the same event;
- we are allowed to dance open events which gives us experience against better dancers;
- we still get comments about our dancing from strangers so we must do something right!
- we’ve lost a bit of weight!
