People often take for granted the role that wealth and classism play in competitive dance. In a world where attending TDA costs more than I paid for a semester of uni, where now dancers attend nearly a dozen competitions per year and seem to do a different solo at each, where flying to California to say you competed on the west coast (even if you arenât west coast-based) is seen as a huge achievement, people who maybe arenât old enough to really understand finance need to know that most elite competitive dancers are from total 1% families.
And thatâs not to say that this makes them bad people, but itâs more to give some perspective: this is not an accessible world. This is not a world that is in line with how the vast majority people in the world live. And when youâre a dancer, particularly a young dancer, who trains 20+ hours a week and spends darn near every weekend from March on competing, traveling and staying in hotels with people who are, for the most part, just like you, you tend to get a skewed sense of the world. You tend to know very little outside of your own circumstances. (Not to mention the amount of kids who are homeschooled for dance.
I was a âpoorâ dancer - my family struggled financially, but we had the good fortune of my brother and sister never doing any extracurricular, never travelling, etc. that dance was somewhat attainable for me. Nevertheless I worked at my studio to get a discount in my tuition, I used secondhand costumes, my parents didnât accompany me on a single trip. We didnât even hold a candle to the kind of demands studios, companies and competitive teams have nowadays, but it still felt difficult being around kids who were so much better off than me.
Not because it made them bad people, but because for the most part they just didnât understand.
When one girl told me she was sick of people calling her spoiled because she âworked really hard for everything she hadâ I was caught somewhere between wanting to guffaw and wanting to cry. This girl had only ever had one job - teaching at the studio. She didnât have to apply. She didnât even want to do the drudge work that I was doing - reception, cleaning, sorting costumes, selling dance wear, sending invoices. I even cleaned up pee when a few of the little ones had accidents. She hadnât ever known what it was like to spend all summer working at a fast food joint coming home with fries stuck to her shoe, smelling like shortening, taking orders, being treated like crap by people. She didnât know what it was like to work 5 am-8 am before school because that was the only way you could accommodate your schedule. And yet she had her own car the second she got her G2 - was I to believe she had paid for that all by herself?
So when I see people telling stories about being at competitions and being upset because theyâve been spurned or alienated by other teams, Iâm sad but Iâm not surprised. Competitive dance is kind of like an isolated community where you know so little about the outside. You donât think youâre wrong, but you still have no idea how - or no desire - to relate with anyone else.
This isnât me saying that your faves arenât the amazing âcinnamon rollsâ you see them as; children are innocent and donât have these biases or tendencies on purpose. But I think itâs safe to say that few realize how charmed a life they live, or how different their world is from the ârealâ world. My hope is that dancers are able to grow up with enough self-awareness to not let that affect the person they become when they are older.
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