Project 1 - Rough Draft
Since my first ballet classes, dance has been an instrumental part of my life. Every choreography, practice, and competition holds special memories deep in my heart. However, in a sport where timing is everything and the smallest errors can make or break a routine, communication is vitally important. Due to the fact that dancing is a precision sport, the dancing community employs multiple genres of communication to ensure that each dancer, coach, and parent is on the same wavelength. Depending on the audience and urgency of the intended message, the dancing community will adjust their methods of reaching the target audience accordingly. Using the genres of email, Facebook, and hard-copy schedules, dance studios send out information to both dancers and parents regarding practices, competitions, and meetings. On the other hand, videos and beat sheets are useful for coaches communicating to their dancers about improvements that can be made within the dance.
Behind the scenes of a successful dance studio or team, there is an exuberant amount of of planning, practicing, and refining that must be coordinated. As I transitioned into competitive dance at Dance Mania during my freshman year of high school, I was exposed to the immense amount of planning that goes into every single team. Every week consisted of multiple practices, costume fittings, and team meetings. With such as busy schedule as a dancer, the studio had to organize these events and help dancers, as well as their parents, manage their time accordingly. Just as I was involved in many other clubs, organizations, and sports, many of my teammates and coaches were very busy outside of the studio. Utilizing detailed, color coded hard-copy schedules, Dance Mania laid out all of our practices, meetings, and costume fittings months in advance. This was essential to each and every member of the team because there were several other responsibilities my teammates and I had to complete to be allowed to dance competitively. For example, weekends our team had competitions were very demanding, and that prevented me from completing schoolwork or working on those days. Often times, our competitions took place in different states and overlapped with my parents’ work schedules. For this reason, it was essential that the studio make all dancers, parents, and coaches aware of these events. Utilizing my schedule and planning several weeks in advance, I would complete schoolwork ahead of time and make arrangements at my workplace. Unfortunately, dance is a sport that constantly keeps you on your toes both figuratively and literally. There are impromptu changes that are always popping up at the last minute that must be communicated quickly to hundreds of dancers, coaches, and parents. Unfortunately, hard-copy schedules are difficult to distribute quickly, and amending them is both time consuming as well as inefficient. To deal with these last minute changes, my dance studio employed email and Facebook posts. As competitions neared, both my parents and I would receive several emails a day with new information of performance times, additional practices and costume fittings, and required attire for award ceremonies. Not to mention, the studio would post these announcements on their Facebook page which would notify anyone in the group. The day of our biggest competition of the 2016 competition series, Summit, my coach sent out an email at five o'clock in the morning tell us our performance time had been moved from an afternoon slot to an early morning slot. Normally, it took several hours to prepare for a competition because I had to iron my poms, style my hair in a certain manner, and apply a boatload of makeup before even driving to the competition. Therefore, you can imagine my stress levels when I had less than thirty minutes to prepare for the competition and load my mother’s car with my costumes and award ceremony outfit. As illustrated in my experience, dance is always surprising you, and email and Facebook are modes of communication that allow us to stay on top of these changes. In addition to be quicker and more efficient at supplying new information, they are also a more direct way to reach people as Facebook and email are constantly being checked by people of all ages and demographics.