Project 1 - Final 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 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 a 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, on weekends our team had competitions that were very demanding, and prevented me from completing schoolwork 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 made 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. 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, my coach sent out an email at five o'clock in the morning telling 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, 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. 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.
Just as the best athletes in the world are always trying to improve, dancers are constantly trying to find ways to improve their overall skill and technique. However, to an untrained eye, the difference between a winning routine and an average routine are almost impossible to differentiate. Dancing for many years, it is still hard to see my own mistakes within a routine and correct them without the help of an additional set of eyes. Facing this problem, almost all competitive dance studios employ video and beat sheets to assist their dancers in reaching their maximum potential. When trying to teach a dancer a new routine, beat sheets are an extremely effective genre of communication. These sheets lay out the music by individual beat and overlay them with the dance routine that is being performed. By reading over these sheets, dancers can memorize their dance even outside of scheduled practices. It also makes it much easier to incorporate changes when the dancers know the music so well. Personally, I study the beat sheets throughout the entire season to refine my timing because timing is one of the biggest factors that judges take into account when scoring a routine. Not to mention, miniscule details such as pointed toes, facial expressions, and spacing are also heavily factored into the scoring of competitive dance teams. For this reason, it is essential for every dancer to know exactly where they should be and master the moves that they are required to do. This is why video is essential to the process and helps all dancers better understand what their weaknesses and strengths are. By analyzing video, coaches can help dancers see adjustments they need to make throughout the routine to improve the overall appeal of the dance. This genre of communication is extremely effective because dancers can pick out individuals parts of the dance they need to work on and see what techniques and skill sets have room for improvement. Without video, dancers would be unable to visualize where they are making mistakes and unable to see if they have corrected or improved upon their weaknesses. Within my own dancing career, these methods of communication have taught me my strength is flexibility and my biggest weakness is turning sequences. The capability to see these has helped me, as well as many of my teammates to become better dancers.
Overall, dancing is a very demanding and rigorous sport that involves a lot of small details and packed schedules. For these reasons, communication across multiple platforms is necessary to allow dancers, coaches, and parents to work effectively together. Due to the fact that each message has a different level of urgency and audience, these methods of communication must incorporate a variety of techniques to reach their target audience. Throughout my dancing career, I have witnessed first hand how important communication between groups and individuals are. All the constant emailing, video, scheduling, and much more seems like a pain sometimes, but it is the glue that holds together all the teams I was so fortunate to be a part of.