dance

[Dasubervixen]

Hello Belabera,

If you define a sport as an organized, competitive, and skillful physical activity requiring commitment and fair play. Then dancing can be a sport. There are plenty of organized dance competitions around the world today and there have been for hundreds if not thousands of years. Most people don't think of dance as a sport. Mainly because they don't dance for sport. But dance is a sport.

Here's an example of dance as sport. I'm an avid fan of Championship Ballroom Dancing. I love to watch the competitions.

Click here to see the video

The couples in the video are highly trained and very skilled athletes. They are also as fiercely competitive as any other sportspersons. Just more civilized. (hehe)

So Belabera, dance is very much a sport. As well as an art, social activity, courtship ritual and a whole lot of other things.

[Jezebelle]

On the other hand, some of us prefer to skip the competitive aspect. I have no doubt about the skill and talent and training and endurance involved in competitive dancing. It's just not my scene. Yes, I'd call that a sport, but my kind of dancing I wouldn't. When it's all about cooperation and you don't care about comparing your skills against anyone else's, it stops being a sport. It's all for fun, and you can appreciate everyone else's moves without trying to do better. Maybe even helping each other look better instead because the whole party is more fun for everyone that way.
"Dancing" is a pretty big category and some types of dance fall more into one category than another, but there's a lot of grey area. Ballet is traditionally a performance art, but that doesn't mean there's no competition for big roles. Figure skating is a performance art that incorporates stylized dancing with ice skating, but it's obviously a structured, competitive Olympic sport. Choreographed modern dance, professionally, on stage or in front of a camera, is both a competitive performance art and skilled occupation. Showing off your moves in a night club can sometimes be considered competitive, especially in terms of getting the amount and type of attention you want, but calling it a sport would be a stretch. Or a euphemism. Just enjoying yourself moving to the music, with or without a partner, alone or at a party, whether anyone else is watching or not, is just fun with nothing to compete over.

Oh, uhm.. as for the question you actually asked, I don't think I can provide any evidence that dancing is "not" a sport because "sport" and "dancing" both have to be clearly defined to tell where they do and don't overlap. Sometimes it is, sometimes it isn't.

[ValliKat]

This post confuses me.

[Dasubervixen]

Sometimes it is, sometimes it isn't.

This is probably the best answer.

It really depends on who's doing the dancing and why.

[Jezebelle]

This post confuses me.

I suspect Belabera found us by Googling for forums for dancers and may not be aware that our particular style of dancing takes place in the "virtual world" of an online game. And even there, it could be "sometimes" called a sport. There are "dance contests" from time to time at the org parties.

If you didn't know about the game, Belabera, it's free to play if you want to come join us and chat about dancing or anything. It's called Anarchy Online, and you can create a free account and download it at http://www.anarchy-online.com . Get the "small client" if you're low on disk space and pretty sure you just want to check it out for free. If you upgrade to a paid subscription later, you'll need the "full client" for all the additional content.

If you're looking for a forum about "real world" dancing, maybe someone here knows one. I'm afraid I don't.

[Dasubervixen]

www.dance-forums.com