Most people say that dance is an art, hobby, or something like that. According to the web a sport is an activity involving physical exertion and skill in which an individual or team competes against another or others for entertainment. That is exactly what dance is.

First, can I just say that pointe is probably the hardest thing I have ever done? You are literally dancing on your big toe doing turns, leaps, and so much choreography.

Dance takes the same amount of time, work, and effort as any other sport. Sometimes more! For example, I did gymnastics and soccer and by far the hardest sport out of the three is dance.

People don’t see what goes into every bit of choreography in every dance. They just see the final result. As dancers, it is our job to make everything we do look as easy as possible even though it hurts, it’s hard, and we’re exhausted. Your brain is thinking about a million things at once. Point your toes, turn out, pull up in your center, make sure you are in the correct position, timing, don’t look stressed, remember your choreo, smile, show emotion, dance as big as you can, and look like you are enjoying yourself all at the same time.

20 Hours of Practice

“What could dancers possibly do at practice that long?” “They don’t even do anything.” Those are some questions and comments that I get a lot. I can understand why people would be confused because before I started dance I had no idea what the life of a dancer was like.

In those 20 hours of training there are countless things that we do, but the main things are technique, run dances, clean dances, and stretch.

Technique is basically turns, leaps, flexibility, and anything like that. A few technique classes we have are jazz, ballet, contemporary, and sometimes hip-hop. No one likes those classes, but they are very important when it comes to dance.

When we run and clean dances we basically do a mark through which is just not doing it to your fullest ability. It’s running the dance all the way through a couple times. This is very very tiring but we get through it and build up stamina. While we are doing the dances our instructors will watch and write down a bunch of notes that we need to fix. We then go through those and fix those mistakes.

Lastly, stretching takes up a lot of class time because if we are not warmed up we can get very hurt and in dance if one person is hurt then it messes everything up. What people also don’t remember is that there are eight styles of dance and we have to do those things for all of them.

As you can see, there are many things dancers must do.