Competition who wins? What's lost?

Tanned and comfortable before her media audience, Amanda Schull visits her family in Jackson, Mississippi. Now a dancer in the corps at San Francisco Ballet and a veteran actress and dancer in the feature film Center Stage, Schull remembers her first encounter with the USA International Ballet Competition on a previous visit. "I hadn't even heard of the competition, but I was here so I thought I would give it a try. Then you had to audition to get in. I didn't even make the first cut, but I stayed to see the rest of the competition and realized, `Wow, this is what it's all about.'"

Schull articulates some of the benefits of participating in festival-style competition: the opportunity to perform good, appropriate, and flattering choreography and to display a background of focused training and coaching, including the ability to project musicality, character, emotion, and excitement to an audience. The skills of performance are learned incrementally through practice before a live audience--beginning with school recitals and concerts, followed by guest appearances and benefits, and participation with more seasoned performers. But there is never quite enough opportunity to perform. Competitions provide one more stage on which to learn those skills.

Competing is a reality check. Witnessing other fine dancers from other places, with different training and other points of view, allows competitors to compare skills, levels, and styles. These dancers may someday be partners, peers in a company, or members of the same chorus, and they will definitely be members of the greater dance community. Some lifelong associations are made in the short residence at competitions, and the network of colleagues, fans, and other people in support systems often begins here.

COMPETITIONS FOR SCHOLARSHIPS GREW out of showcases during annual dance teachers' conferences; many of these conventions also offer classes and workshops with master teachers who students might ordinarily never see. Teachers may be serving as adjudicators, be on holiday or between contracts, or be accompanying someone else at the event. Several years ago at a Ballet and Modern Dance Competition in Nagoya, Japan, Bolshoi ballerina Ekaterina Maximova was having difficulty communicating with her pianist, and her class of international students at the competition had grown restless. In walked her partner, Vladimir Vasiliev, who took over much of the class. Maximova was disgruntled, but the students were ecstatic at the opportunity to take class from them both.

There's much to be won, of course: cash awards and titles, and most of all scholarships for continued training. When Jose Manuel Carreno (then partnering Ana Lobe) was awarded the City of Jackson Grand Prix in 1990 the prize was $10,000 U.S., which meant a great deal to the contingent from a then-heavily blockaded country. At this year's Dance Educators of America (DEA) Western Finals, Executive Director Vickie Sheer announced that her organization had awarded more than 300 scholarships, which had saved parents of aspiring dancers more than $100,000. At many competitions, the tuition scholarships go directly to the school for the student.

It isn't all about winning, either. It is important for performers to be seen by agents, presenters, artistic directors, and teachers of advanced schools. This exposure often brings opportunities for jobs, contracts, and apprenticeships; some are unforeseen bonuses to awards. At the 2002 USA IBC, junior silver medalist Sarah Kathryn Lane and junior gold medalist Joseph Phillips were invited on an all-expense-paid trip and the opportunity to perform with Ballet Hawaii. At the same event, Miami City Ballet Artistic Director Edward Villella remarked that he watched the winners less than those less-finished dancers that he might invite to his company to mold and guide in his own style.

Talented tap dancer Cory Clark participated in competitions several years ago, but reported that he never won; he was never Mr. Dance or held a similar title. But this year Clark is working, teaching master classes in tap to hundreds of dancers across the country while he is a student of architecture at Notre Dame University.

The "everyone's a winner" maxim is true in that no one can ever take away the experience and focus of training gained while competing for excellence. Relishing that extra push to extend limits and experiencing the intensity and exhilaration of so many people cheering are irreplaceable experiences for dancers. Then, too, there's the travel: It may be the only time a dancer ever stays at New York's Waldorf-Astoria or in Lausanne, Switzerland, for example.

More rare are competitions for special areas of dance, such as choreography. These competitions provide incentive and cash to choreographers to make new material. And since no one makes a dance without dancers, those competition awards are often centered on membership organizations that hold annual festivals, such as Regional Dance America's Craft of Choreography Conference, and American College Dance Festivals. Alone in their field, the Leo's Dancewear company's cash awards provide material and motivation for young choreographers to create fresh choreography for concert jazz dance.

There's nothing inherently positive or negative about competition, but people's mind-sets can make it a good or bad experience--and that, too, can't be taken away. Parents and dancers sometimes display bad attitudes or actions. If their dancer doesn't win, they may grumble about the unfairness of judges or accuse them of bias or ineptitude. Dancers can make excuses, not owning their behavior or performance on that day. It becomes "someone else's fault," a mean-spirited and unrealistic attitude. Habitual competitors, those who dance only to compete, learn works to perform, but don't take class to learn technical skills for incremental, age-appropriate growth. This leaves them largely without a dance education and lacking in the ability to continue their success beyond their own limited repertoire. Similarly, students may not develop musicality, since their dancing does not grow with an ordered technical development to a wide range of music.

A greater and perhaps more permanent handicap relates to what psychologists call locus of control. If someone else is always judging whether the work/performance/time is good or poor, dancers can fail to develop their own values. Without developing the discipline and self-awareness to judge themselves, dancers can remain permanently disempowered and under the control of others.

Audiences can perceive the loss of the joy of movement when dancers perform two-plus minutes of only tricks with preparation. It is especially apparent when the performer does not begin or finish with the musical phrasing and, at the end, never looks at the audience or takes a bow. These performers are simply not dancing and seem to have forgotten what brought them to study in the first place.

There is a progressive loss of artistry in the dance field when those performers continue to professional careers. The pattern of winning--and aiming to repeat that win rather than originating new work or defining character--can be destructive not only to the dancer, but to those who watch. What becomes of the art, the nuance of character gained from experience when there is only competition? Where is there room for delicacy and development if the goal is only to astonish with tricks? If dance is just about jumping highest or spinning fastest and longest--and getting cheers from the stands--we should close the theaters and acknowledge that it's an arena sport and no longer a theatrical art form.

Merrill Leigh is a writer for Dance Magazine.