Warren J. Dew
Forum Master
The "Parents and School" thread started going off into a discussion about amateur and pro-am competition. This thread is for further discussion of that tangent.
To start it off, as someone who has competed both amateur and pro-am, I'll point out some of the things about each that seem to be commonly misunderstood by those that have only done the other.
Probably the thing that pro-ams are most likely to fail to understand about amateur competition is the concept of a committed dance partnership. Here are some of the features of a typical amateur partnership:
- Your partner makes as many mistakes as you do. Your partner's mistakes affect your dancing, and of course your mistakes affect your partner's dancing.
- When you do something wrong, you can't tell if it's because you made a mistake, or if you were actually doing your part right and your partner made a mistake that affected you instead.
- You spend lots of time talking to or arguing with your partner trying to figure out why something is going wrong, and who needs to change to fix it.
- Both you and your partner have scheduling constraints that make it difficult to find good times to practice.
- Both you and your partner have coaching preferences that can make it difficult to figure out where to get the best instruction.
- Your partner has personal foibles that can be difficult for you to recognize and account for, which can make communication difficult. Since communication is the basis for almost everything else in the partnership, this is a big issue. Of course, you may have personal foibles as well - you may not even be aware of them, which just makes things even more difficult.
- Oh yeah, you dance together, too, at least when things are working right ... during which time you worry as much about your partner's dancing as about your own.
A serious amateur partnership - one in which ballroom dancing is one of the most important things in the partners' lives - takes a tremendous amount of personal investment just to make the relationship work, even before any dancing is taken into account. That's why amateur competitors tend to react very strongly when others seem to downplay what such a partnership involves - such as by saying they are "lucky" to have someone to dance with for free (it wasn't luck, it took a lot of hard work to find the right partner, and while it's "free" in terms of money, it's paid for in personal commitment and energy), or when they seem to think it's just like a pro am partnership without the pay (it might be like the pro side of a pro-am partnership without the pay, but with all the hassles that the pro takes care of so the student doesn't have to worry about them).
And it's not like the amateur can use a different term to clarify the relationship - the only available word is "partner". The pro-am has a bunch of words available - "teacher", "instructor", "coach" - so for the amateur, it only confuses things when the pro-am coopts the term "partner" as well, using it for only that small subset of amateur partnership that is also applicable to the pro-am situation.
Because amateur competition is so focused on the partnership, though, amateur competitors often miss a lot of the important points of pro-am competition.
For example, just because pro-am competitions don't involve committed dance partnerships doesn't mean that they don't involve commitment. The student can have a great deal of commitment to the student's own dancing, as can the instructor.
Nor does it mean there isn't real competition. Indeed, pro-am competition is in a way more pure than amateur competition. The instructor serves to create the optimal circumstances so that the student can perform at his or her best, with as little outside limitation as possible. In that sense, pro-am seems to be a purer, more direct form of competition between the individual students - more of a "sport", if you will, since there's less "relationship" stuff to complicate matters.
It doesn't mean there isn't real dancing, either. The instructor tries to create the best possible circumstances for the student, but it is still the student out there dancing. Indeed, because the instructor is good enough that he or she doesn't interfere with the student's dancing, the student can dance to the student's own true potential. And that's probably the point about pro-am competition that amateur competitors, limited as they are by imperfect partners, most often fail to understand.
To start it off, as someone who has competed both amateur and pro-am, I'll point out some of the things about each that seem to be commonly misunderstood by those that have only done the other.
Probably the thing that pro-ams are most likely to fail to understand about amateur competition is the concept of a committed dance partnership. Here are some of the features of a typical amateur partnership:
- Your partner makes as many mistakes as you do. Your partner's mistakes affect your dancing, and of course your mistakes affect your partner's dancing.
- When you do something wrong, you can't tell if it's because you made a mistake, or if you were actually doing your part right and your partner made a mistake that affected you instead.
- You spend lots of time talking to or arguing with your partner trying to figure out why something is going wrong, and who needs to change to fix it.
- Both you and your partner have scheduling constraints that make it difficult to find good times to practice.
- Both you and your partner have coaching preferences that can make it difficult to figure out where to get the best instruction.
- Your partner has personal foibles that can be difficult for you to recognize and account for, which can make communication difficult. Since communication is the basis for almost everything else in the partnership, this is a big issue. Of course, you may have personal foibles as well - you may not even be aware of them, which just makes things even more difficult.
- Oh yeah, you dance together, too, at least when things are working right ... during which time you worry as much about your partner's dancing as about your own.
A serious amateur partnership - one in which ballroom dancing is one of the most important things in the partners' lives - takes a tremendous amount of personal investment just to make the relationship work, even before any dancing is taken into account. That's why amateur competitors tend to react very strongly when others seem to downplay what such a partnership involves - such as by saying they are "lucky" to have someone to dance with for free (it wasn't luck, it took a lot of hard work to find the right partner, and while it's "free" in terms of money, it's paid for in personal commitment and energy), or when they seem to think it's just like a pro am partnership without the pay (it might be like the pro side of a pro-am partnership without the pay, but with all the hassles that the pro takes care of so the student doesn't have to worry about them).
And it's not like the amateur can use a different term to clarify the relationship - the only available word is "partner". The pro-am has a bunch of words available - "teacher", "instructor", "coach" - so for the amateur, it only confuses things when the pro-am coopts the term "partner" as well, using it for only that small subset of amateur partnership that is also applicable to the pro-am situation.
Because amateur competition is so focused on the partnership, though, amateur competitors often miss a lot of the important points of pro-am competition.
For example, just because pro-am competitions don't involve committed dance partnerships doesn't mean that they don't involve commitment. The student can have a great deal of commitment to the student's own dancing, as can the instructor.
Nor does it mean there isn't real competition. Indeed, pro-am competition is in a way more pure than amateur competition. The instructor serves to create the optimal circumstances so that the student can perform at his or her best, with as little outside limitation as possible. In that sense, pro-am seems to be a purer, more direct form of competition between the individual students - more of a "sport", if you will, since there's less "relationship" stuff to complicate matters.
It doesn't mean there isn't real dancing, either. The instructor tries to create the best possible circumstances for the student, but it is still the student out there dancing. Indeed, because the instructor is good enough that he or she doesn't interfere with the student's dancing, the student can dance to the student's own true potential. And that's probably the point about pro-am competition that amateur competitors, limited as they are by imperfect partners, most often fail to understand.
