Most of my current writing is slightly dry1 musings on R, but every once in a while it’s a deluge of feelings spilled out during a dance event. Guess what today is.
Part of how I got into marathons was that I ran one on a whim2, it went horribly, and I felt I could not hold my head up high until I had done one “right.”3 I might be doing the same thing with dance competition.
My least favorite aspect of West Coast Swing is the competitive piece. I’m a competitive person, but really only when it comes to things I’m good at, and I am bad at this.4 Really bad at it.
Competing is by no means required. Most of my dancing is social, and I’m lucky to live in an area with regular weekly and monthly socials. But I also like immersive experiences, so I also travel to weekend events, and these are structured largely around competition. That’s not the only reason to go – there are workshops for learning, and there’s social dancing with crowds that last all night. At a big event you can stay plenty busy while ignoring that competitions are happening – as long as you stay out of the main ballroom during the day and change the subject every time someone interprets, “Hey, how’s it going?” as “Did you make finals?” which is to say, every other conversation.
A few things are particularly random about swing dance competitions:
- You don’t know who your partners will be
- You don’t know what music you’ll dance to
- You’re initially on a floor with maybe 20 other pairs, so you only have the judges’ attention for a few seconds of each song.
There are one or more preliminary rounds, where each judge gives each individual competitor a “yes” or “no” – so your success or failure doesn’t depend on your partner – and the top handful of people move on. In the final round you’re paired with a new random person and judged as a couple.
Lots of things are arbitrary about this, and I’m an excellent rationalizer when it comes to protecting my own ego. Dancing is subjective. Dancing under bright lights on a sparse floor is unnatural. Following is more competitive than leading.5 Every judge is looking for something different. Yet, I have remarkably consistent results, so…maybe the problem is me.
I don’t compete at every event, but more often than not I get caught up in the spirit and sign up.6 At my first event, I didn’t think to compete, just thought, “Huh, there’s a new potential experience, maybe I’ll try it sometime.” I gave it a shot it at my second, did poorly, and shrugged it off.
A year-plus later, if I had a report card, it would list out six events, four in the newcomer division and two in novice7, with a zero next to each of them. There is a central competitive registry that acts a report card, but your record only includes events where you got at least a point. I’m invisible.
But even my non-existent report card doesn’t reflect my real source of shame, because it only lists rank and points, not individual judges’ scores. Every single judge ever has said “No” to me. With three to five judges in each event, that’s about twenty people who have watched me dance, and not a single one of them has thought, “Yes, her, I see something in her.”
The full scorecard from this weekend even redacts my name, offering the digital equivalent of a paper bag to put over my face, not that I asked for one.
Why participate in something I’m consistently bad at and unhappy about, rather than put all of my energy into the glorious chaos of social dancing? Pandora’s box will not re-close. Having been effectively judged The Worst Dancer at the Event8 every time I’ve tried, that will haunt me until I get contrary evidence.9
Every time, I think I won’t have any expectations and don’t care about the outcome…yet surely I’ve improved since last time, right? And then I get excited, and then do poorly, and then feel renewed jealousy of successful followers and renewed anxiety about dancing with successful leads.10 Shockingly, this does not improve my dancing.
This weekend was the first time I competed following a rule change for the newcomer division. Each division has a point maximum: reach that, and you can no longer compete at that level, you must move up. Newcomers now may not have any points. I don’t know what it used to be, but I do remember being surprised when I first competed and realized that there were others in my division who had not only competed before but who had won before, who didn’t seem like “newcomers.”11
This means I have a better chance, but it also means showing up a newcomer signals that I’ve never had any kind of success, which is fine when I’m far from home but harder to swallow at local events among people I’ve been dancing with for two years.12 And now I get to respond to questions like this from strangers:
Are you new here, too? …Oh, really? But I thought you move on up as soon as…oh.
Awkward. Did not lead to, “So, would you like to dance?”
- Never. ↩︎
- Bad idea. ↩︎
- “Right” = No stopping by the side of the road to cry for a while, and no accepting painkillers from strangers. ↩︎
- “This” is definitely competitive dancing, less clear whether applies to all dancing. ↩︎
- Both because there are usually more followers than leaders, and because followers, being mostly women, tend to have more dance experience than leads, who are mostly men. ↩︎
- Apparently I’m a lemming. ↩︎
- Novice is higher than newcomer, but not all events field a newcomer division. ↩︎
- Of people who are competing. And sometimes there’s a tie. Nonetheless, doesn’t feel great. ↩︎
- Or until I evolve, which will probably take longer. ↩︎
- And basically give up on my nascent leading, which is definitely worse than my following. ↩︎
- Now novice will get way bigger and more competitive than it already was, but that’s a challenge for the distant future. ↩︎
- Really, my friends don’t care and no one else notices. But clearly I care. ↩︎
North on Quincy 
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