Racing to All-Star: 4/27/24

“I remember everything anyone has said to me about my dancing, good and bad.”

That (roughly paraphrased) appeared on an application for the first Mentorship Program I ran at Easter Swing in 2022. It informed much of the direction of that cohort and the ones that followed.

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I first attended ESS while in Intermediate. During the weekend, I wound up in a conversation with a much more seasoned competitor who warned me:

“You’re going to move up to All-Star fast because you’ve got previous training and you’re a lead. But you’re going to miss out on critical time spent developing in the lower divisions. You’re going to get to All-Star and find out you don’t know what you’re doing.”

Fast forward to a little less than two years later and I was semi-regularly in All-Star finals. Emboldened by a few drinks, some of my competitive peers laid out the hard facts of my recent performances:

“You make it to finals because you look good in prelims, but you don’t actually know how to successfully structure a dance yet, so its a fluke if you place.”

That comment haunted the way I thought about my dancing for years after. I defined myself as a dancer better suited to prelims than spotlights, which felt doubly embarrassing as a routine competitor.

I had raced ahead to make All-Star without really considering what that meant. With the exception of that one experienced dancer at ESS, everyone had encouraged me to climb the ladder as quickly as possible.

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There are a lot of resources in our community for learning how to compete well, but there are fewer that challenge us to question why we compete or how competition fits into our lives as dancers.