What is Dance?

Dance is a form of self expression through movement. There are many different styles of dance such as contemporary, lyrical, ballet, tap, ballroom, jazz, hiphop, and many more. Many people start dancing at a very young age, for instance I started dancing when I was two years old. Although, one doesn’t necessarily have to start this young to be successful. Take Misty Copeland for example. She was the first African American woman to be promoted to principal dancer with the American Ballet Theatre, and she took her first ballet class at the age of thirteen. Lots of people tend to argue on whether or not dance is a sport or an art. In my opinion, it all depends on what your goal is when you perform. If you’re performing specifically for entertainment purposes, even though it still takes an extreme amount of athleticism, you could say that that form of dance is more of an art. If you’re performing competitively however, I would argue that that leans more towards being a sport. I primarily dance competitively with my dance team. This means that we travel to many different competitions during regionals season, and compete against other studios. During the summer, we attend nationals. The team practices five days a week, sometimes for four hours a day. It’s lots of work, but it’s worth it when we get to nationals. As one could probably imagine, competitive dance takes up pretty much all of our free time. It’s a sport that takes an exceptional amount of dedication, and some college dance teams practice more than twenty hours a week. It can be difficult to balance dance and school, but that just proves how much we love it. Despite the fact that I’ve been dancing all my life, it still doesn’t get old, and I would seriously recommend trying it to everyone because it is a fantastic way to express yourself.