I grew up dancing in the era of the dance competition: the scratchy rhinestone costumes, the 6am call times, the changing rooms in halls of low-end hotels, the judges’ harsh corrections doled out like candy. But I was lucky in many ways! I danced with the same group of girls since we were little children, and we never allowed a judge’s score to get us down. In the wings, we cheered. We supported each other when one of us had an injury. I made some of my best friends at my dance studio, and I am glad about that. Not everyone was as fortunate as me, and I saw firsthand what happened to some dancers at other studios when the culture around competition took its toll.
Precision is at the heart of the comp world. Judges score by height of extension, number of turns, the difficulty of a trick, really anything that can be rated and graded. That is why dance goes out the window when you are being judged and scored. Dance is supposed to be an expressive art form, a way of translating feeling into movement, not an obstacle course to be cleared for points. Dancers begin to lose the fun, freedom, and self-expression that brought them to the studio as kids, while medals and trips to nationals take precedence.
I watched that drift happen to people I cared about. Those girls who could get audiences to cry during their performances came offstage telling themselves they were not talented because they didn’t move or look exactly like another girl who scored higher. Meanwhile, I felt a different kind of pressure, but not from anybody around me. I felt it because I wanted to be an artist first and a competitor second. The focus on appearance, body, smile, “sparkle” made plenty of talented, artistic girls feel inadequate; the competition culture was what made them feel that way.
This is not just my personal interpretation. Nicholas Rowe, a dance-studies academic at the University of Auckland, has spent years asking why so many young people quit dance once they hit adolescence, and points squarely at how entangled competition has become with the activity itself: for a lot of teenagers, the ideas of dancing, winning, and losing are now inseparable. He directly follows the stories of young women grappling with body image and self-esteem back to the studio experiences of not feeling as good as the dancer next to them, of not feeling good enough to continue.
That comparison starts young, and it is not only about who lands the cleanest turn. Santa Clara University’s Markkula Center for Applied Ethics looks at how the competitive culture of the dance world can drive very young dancers to wear increasingly sexualized costumes with a focus on presentation, and associates that culture with the high incidence of negative body image, low self-esteem, and disordered eating among competitors. Nothing has to do with artistry. It revolves around the appearance of a dancer on a stage constructed to be scored, not to tell a story.
The expenses are not just anecdotal. A 2024 University of Northern Colorado master’s thesis by researcher Gloria Brunner study examined thirteen competitive dancers aged ten to thirteen and discovered that, although competitive dance can have a positive effect on building confidence, joy, and resilience (and I would add teamwork and friendship), it also places actual psychological pressure on the dancers, in the form of anxiety and stress that becomes magnified by coaches and peer comparison, which I observed happening over the years. The recommendation that came with the study, however, was not to eliminate competition; it was to create much more mental-health support in the studios, where competition culture usually begins.
The dancers who are experiencing it are certainly aware of the tension. In another University of Northern Colorado master’s thesis, competitive dancers of high-school age were surveyed specifically by researcher Teresa Schmitt to assist students, their families, and dance educators to weigh the benefits and costs of studio competition training, evidence that the dancers in this world are already feeling that there is a trade-off that should be named.
All this does not imply that competition dance has no value. The working professionals interviewed in Dance Magazine cite years on the circuit as the reason they are able to learn new choreography in a short amount of time, stand on the stage with unflinching confidence, or dance eight shows a week without collapsing. That training builds real skill, stamina, and discipline. It does not, however, take into consideration that comp culture is not free, and currently, the majority of studios require dancers and their families to absorb the expense, without weighing the cost against what is actually gained.
In light of these things, as a dancer, I started to move in the other direction. I auditioned for a performing arts high school dance program focused more on the art form itself than the performative aspect, and my dancing leveled up. I do not regret my years in the dance company. I made some of my best friends there, and it taught me much of the discipline that I continue to depend on. But I wish I hadn’t spent so much of my life dancing to pursue a score rather than a feeling.
Dance was never intended to be competitive. It is an art, and exists to stir something within both the dancer and the audience, and that is more difficult to achieve every year that we allow trophies to dictate what “good” dancing should be. Competitive dance should stay; however, studios, judges, and parents should keep the art form front and center so that dancers never forget why they began.