Have you had an opportunity to watch our recent Market After Dark performance? Our dancers performed beautifully! Anytime our dancers hit the stage we are SO proud. There is so much work that leads into a performance. Dancers spend hours in rehearsals. Teachers and choreographers work behind the scenes on choreography and costuming. Families drive their dancers to weekly technique classes. All this preparation for a few precious minutes onstage!
We pride ourselves on providing performance opportunities for our students. The sweat, the hard work, the stress… we think it is 100% worth it! When our students step on stage, they are not only getting a chance to showcase their hard work; they are learning life skills!
Live performance teaches our dancers how to handle pressure, the value of preparation, and how to quickly adapt to the unexpected. These skills are extremely valuable to dancers both in and out of the dance studio.
Today we wanted to dive into a few more perks of getting on stage. Performances are SO much more than make-up and costumes! Our favorite perks of performing:
- Performers gain confidence. It takes a lot of grit to step on stage and perform in front of a crowd. Once you have danced onstage, tackling that school presentation or introducing yourself to a new friend doesn’t seem too bad! Dancers learn how to command the space and how to perform their best when in counts.
- Dancers learn how to be resilient. Live performance is not always predictable. The stage can be slippery. Music mistakes happen. Dancers forget their choreography. Performers learn how to recover from set backs. They get a TON of practicing dealing with unpredictable conditions. The show must go on! From a very young age, dancers are taught to KEEP going! Ignore that dropped prop!
- Performances require teamwork. Outside of solos, most dances require working alongside others. You have to learn choreography together, trust your peers to remember their parts, and depend on each other to deliver a solid performance. Any group of dancers has their strengths and weaknesses. Dancers have to learn to come together in a performance to do their collective best!
- Performances allow our dancers to share dance with their community. Performances force us to get out of the studio and into the world! We get the opportunity to share what we love with others. Maybe our performance will make someone smile or inspire an audience member to seek out a dance class. It is a privilege to be able to spend our time doing something we love- performances remind us of how lucky we are!