We are at the airport on our ways home from the 2019 USA Amateur National Dancesport Championships. It’s an ungodly hour in the morning and while we sit here struggling to keep our eyes open, we can’t help but reminisce on the competition this last weekend. This competition is special, in that we don’t have to dance. We travel to Utah solely for the purpose of making sure our students are fully prepared for dance competitions from the first moment to the last.
And looking around at many of the other competitors, it seems our help is needed in many quarters. You might think that most of these competitors are prepared for dance competitions if only the routines mattered. But the truth of it is, in order to be successful, being fully prepared for dance competitions means more than just learning your steps.
In this article, we are going to give you 5 major things you should check and double check to make sure you are fully prepared for dance competitions. If you follow our advice, the likelihood of any last minute malfunctions, surprises, and disasters are almost completely avoided. Of course, it’s impossible to guard against every possibility, but at least give yourself a fighting chance!
1. Two Weeks Before a Dance Competition, Change Your Practice Priorities
In order to practice effectively, there is a time and a place for different types of practice. The four main types of practice are: choreography practice, technical practice, stamina practice, and polishing practice. In the last two weeks before competing, your practice should be made up entirely of stamina practice and polishing practice.
Stamina Practice
How to practice for stamina depends entirely on the specific aspects of your stamina you need to improve. Do you find that you survive through the first three dances and then gradually die out? Or are you able to start each dance relatively fresh, but find yourself struggling to complete the dance?
Either way you look at it, stamina practices mean rounds. Dancing the routines from beginning to end, without stopping, multiple times in a practice session in order to increase your stamina. If you find yourself dying out in the final dance, try a 5-dance of only the final dance. For instance, instead of dancing Waltz-Tango-Viennese-Foxtrot-Quickstep, dance five Quicksteps in a row. Do this twice at the beginning of your practice, before you’re exhausted. It should take less than 20 minutes. Then continue on with your practice as usual. You will find that the final dance will be surprisingly easier during your next competition round.
Polishing Practice
This type of practice is not intended to improve your dance abilities (although it will anyway), but is instead intended to improve the look of your dancing. Sometimes, when we’re working on new technical skills, that can have a temporarily negative effect on the look for the competition floor. If we want to look prepared for dance competitions, that means every second of our routines must look polished.
Take a video of your rounds or from your last competition and pinpoint a few sections in each routine that look considerably worse. Work only on those sections. Then, focus on the path of your arms, not just the finishing line. Make decisions with your partner when you are going to turn your heads, when you want to look at the audience or look at each other, when you want the feeling to be aggressive or nostalgic. All of these things are polishing elements. By focusing on these polishing elements, we increase our performance skills, which is the most helpful on the day of the competition.
2. Check Over and Wash Costumes and Shoes
Ideally, you should be washing your costumes the moment you return home from a dance competition. But if you didn’t, now is the time to do that. If you don’t know how, we wrote a great tutorial for how to wash your dance costumes. Check over your costumes carefully, making sure there are no holes in the fabric or worn seams. Repair any loose hooks, do a quick replacement of rhinestones, and take care to wash out any stains! Your costumes need to air-dry, so doing this at least week in advance is the best advice we could possible give you!
This weekend, we saw far too many filthy, ugly shoes. It’s such a shame. You’ve spent so much money on dance lessons, hair and makeup, your costumes, getting yourself there! And… everything is ruined by those filthy, ugly shoes.
This is such an easy thing to fix. Always make sure you dance with clean, new or like-new shoes. If you think no one will notice, you are wrong! We notice it immediately, and in fact it drops our estimation of you as a dancer. After all, if you pay so little attention to the quality of your shoes, how little attention do you pay to the quality of your technique?
3. Go Through Your Hair and Makeup Supplies
We’ll be completely honest here. The following scenario has happened to us.
Imagine you arrive at the competition. You get a good night of sleep, you eat a great, healthy breakfast, and you’re just sitting down to start getting ready three hours before the comp. You open your makeup bag and start taking out your hair supplies. And voila! Your hairnet has a huge hole in it and there is no drug store nearby. You are in trouble!
We only needed to experience this catastrophe once before we started going through our hair and makeup supplies. That feeling of not being prepared for dance competitions those few hours before you compete is so stressful! We check the amount of foundation left in the bottle and the quality of our powder. If a compact has broken, going through your makeup a week in advance gives you enough time to fix your compact powder – an awesome hack which you can read about right here! It also gives you enough time to buy more hairpins and hairnets, if needed. But when you leave for the airplane and you just know you’re fully prepared for dance competitions, you just have less stress and more peace of mind.
4. Check Into Your Flight Ahead of Time and Plan to Check Bags!
This is a major one. We see students arriving at the location of the dance competition and struggling to find drug stores because they didn’t check a bag and, therefore, didn’t bring their hairspray or liquid foundation or tanning cream.
As dancers, we need a lot of liquids! And liquids need to be checked! Get used to it!
A bag costs you $25. A dance lesson costs anywhere from $50-$250. What’s the point of paying for dance lessons if you’re going to show up the competition unprepared and scrambling because you wanted to save a measly $25? If you’re really strapped for cash, we have a great article here that will give you some money saving hacks. But skimping on bag fees is not one of those hacks!
When you’re home, you know the brands you like to use and you know which stores to buy them at. Take care of those things here, while you’re in familiar territory, and just come to terms with checking your bag. It’s worth it.
Don’t check your costumes, though. Though we have only had one bag delayed throughout our entire dance career, the risk of the airlines losing the bag is always present. Makeup and street clothes can be replaced. Your costume is not only expensive, but it’s also one-of-a-kind. Carry that costume on the plane with you.
5. Make Your Comp-Day Schedule by Working Backwards
Everybody is different when it comes to how they feel prepared for dance competitions. We like to eat 5 hours before competing, start doing hair and makeup 4 hours before competing, and plan to be in the ballroom 1.5 hours before competing in order to warm up. However, a couple of students that we taught liked to be at the ballroom 6 hours before competing to do a first warm up. Then, 4 hours before competing, they would eat something small and do their hair and makeup on location. 1.5 hours before competing they would do a second warm up. It worked for them, just like our schedule works for us.
It takes some experimentation to figure out your “Comp-Day Ritual”. Try different methods of timing before settling on one that makes you feel comfortable. But no matter your schedule, you need to make it by working backwards from your start time. Always know exactly what time your first round begins, and start working backwards from there.
For instance, imagine your start time is 6:20pm. Using our schedule, we would plan to be in the ballroom by 5:00. Kora would start her hair and makeup at 2:00, whereas Simeon would start his at 4:00. We eat a meal of easily digestible carbs and protein – pasta with chicken breast is a great example – at 1:00. And we often plan to have food around for after the competition so we don’t go to bed hungry.
Being Prepared for Dance Competitions Takes Planning
It’s very important to spend a bit of time before the competition to really make sure you feel prepared. Dance competitions are stressful, and the last thing you want is to feel unprepared. Just think about all of the money and time and effort you’ve already spent getting yourself to this point. The lessons, the costume, the practice time, the sore feet and back! And to think that you might throw it all away just because of a lack of preparation? Don’t go down that road! Think ahead, check your costumes and supplies, check your bag, and make a good schedule for competition day.
Using these tips, we are 100% convinced you will feel more prepared for dance competitions. Did you try them out? Please let us know in the comments below, or tell us if you have some unique tips you’ve discovered from your own competitions. We’d love to hear from you!
