Dance is art.
Art is how we reflect humanity; its successes, its
failures, its triumphs, its challenges. Art is how we express joy, sadness,
pleasure, and pain. To have dance reduced to a competitive event is to demean
the art form. Competitive dance has taken a centuries-old art form, comprising
thousands of disciplines, and reduced it to a series of athletic moves and
tricks to be perfected.
Competitive dance gives no value to continued struggle, or
continued improvement - the end is all that matters. To have dance reduced to
an awards-based athletic event is so counter-intuitive to why humanity evolved
arts, that it may as well be removed from the arts completely. Call it
something else. Call it the sport that it is. Sanction it under a governing
sport body. Rename it.
A dancer is an artist. And artists will struggle for a lifetime
in search of those small moments that give voice to their expressions of
humanity. While professional artists do what they do in order to make a living,
they also do it because the need to do it, the need to express themselves,
burns deep inside.
Competition is not part of the artist's ethos. Painters don't
paint because they want to triumph over other painters and win a trophy. Painters
paint because they need to give people a window into new perspectives on life.
The same can be said of sculptors, authors, performance artists,
and - pop music and the Hollywood system aside - singers, songwriters, and
actors. The reward for dedicating your life to the arts is not found in
trophies. It's found in the soul. It's knowing that you are showing people a
way forward, and potentially opening up new ways of knowing.
Competitive dance can never achieve this.
