What is Blackpool?

Blackpool England is home to the world’s largest ballroom dance competition. It’s mentioned in several big movies – Shall We Dance? (Japanese and American versions), Dance With Me. Often when you lookup Blackpool in a travel guide for England the first sentence is usually “Blackpool is the Las Vegas of Europe.” Hardly. If you take away the hookers, the strippers, the neon lights, the huge extravagant hotels and many other things, then maybe you have Blackpool.

The competition happens right downtown at The Winter Gardens at the end of May.

A typical day starts with competition that starts in the afternoon and lasts until midnight or 1am. For the most part, it’s just one or two competitions per day. (There were 300 couples in the Pro Latin competition this year.)

Pretty standard ballroom dance competition rules. In latin a couple dances 5 dances (Cha Cha, Samba, Rumba, Paso Doble and Jive). In standard a couple dances 4 dances (Waltz, Foxtrot, Tango, and Quickstep). Couples who have danced the previous year and have gotten past the first few rounds are exempt from dancing the first round this year. Each round the panel of judges choose roughly half of the couples to go on to the next round.

The final round is roughly 6 couples, semi-final 12 couples, quarter final 24 couples. When it gets the final, then the judges order the couples.

The Empress Ballroom is huge. It’s much longer than it is wide, and much longer than any of the competition floors in America.

Blackpool is northwest of Manchester 1.5hrs by train. It’s easy to fly into Manchester and hop on a train to Blackpool.

Blackpool is kind of a resort down although it’s no Las Vegas. It is a popular destination for hen and stag parties and there are blocks and blocks of bed and breakfasts…

And there are 3 piers which have various amusements, arcades, casinos, and rides…

And to the south, past the last pier along the promenade are a bunch of cool sculptures, including maybe the world’s largest disco ball? (It’s like 20ft across.)

But the real reason to come to Blackpool is the dancing…

Lighten Up

Dancers take themselves too seriously sometimes. It happens in all dance forms, not just ballroom. It is a bit a hazard of the work. The end result of the art is the body dancing. It takes a lot of mental strength to separate the development and criticism of the art and work from the character of the individual. In painting or writing or sculpture the art becomes some other inanimate object. If it is criticized it’s physically separate from the artist. That doesn’t happen with dance or acting.

Without the separation in the mind, through training and effort, it’s easy to get messed up. To get very sensitive. To get bound to rules and ways things have to be. That provides a bit of mental safety from that it’s just art.

Have you seen “Black Swan”? That’s a documentary! I dated a girl like that once… (LOL)

The healthiest and most successful of dancers develop a detachment. What they do is not who they are. Or at least their value is not only just hinged on their dancing. Many people have the opportunity to have multiple things going on in their lives: work, family, relationships, hobbies. A bigger perspective and balanced view of life can be cultivated. That doesn’t happen with a lot of dancers. It can be such a time consuming thing that that is all they do, it’s where they find relationships, it’s their work, it’s their hobby, it’s everything.

So take a breath. Step back and take a look at the bigger picture of life. Bring more the value of other things to your dance life instead of making it everything. That kind of psycho-ness just drives people away. That competition you’re worrying about isn’t everything. That performance isn’t everything.

Your Dancing is a Result of the Exercises You Do

It’s pretty simple really. Your dancing is a result of the exercises you do. Practicing the steps or your choreography may not help you at all. Good dancing is a product of good movement. Even the best choreography can be danced poorly – boring, lacking in dynamic change, unhealthy movement, etc. What matters is the quality of how it’s done, what gets added to it from yourself, from the exercises you do, from your personal character, from the body training.

This has been known for a long time in ballet, modern, jazz, African, acting, and any number of other classical forms. Seventy to ninety percent of the classes and training there focuses on basic movement, basic exercises, and less on the final form of choreography or the dialog or whatever. Why is it that so many ballroom classes, teachers, and students still are naïve to this and just practice choreography?

Some people have figured that out obviously. I love a quote from Karen Hardy from an educational video when she was dancing with Bryan Watson: “What you see at the end of the day is not what we’re actually working on in the studio, but it becomes that at the end of the day.”

Here’s a quick mind-map of just a smattering of some of the exercises one could do for Latin…