Growing up as a dancer, it’s impossible to avoid the clamour of voices telling you that “dance isn’t a real sport.” While this was usually said to disparage or demean, could there perhaps be some underlying truth to their claim? Dance occupies the liminal position between art and athletic feat and its status as a sport is, understandably, a contentious topic. So how do we decide if dance falls within the category of sport?
First of all, what is a sport? Most people would claim aspects like teamwork, competition, and athleticism are crucial and defining aspects of sport, and it is not difficult to see how dance embodies all of these. Teamwork is evident in the cohesion and collaboration necessary in group performances to achieve synchronicity and unison. Competition is self-explanatory — from the prestigious ballet competition ‘Le Prix de Lausanne’ to the TikTok-viral UDA dance championships in America, competition exists in all styles and at all levels of dance. In terms of athleticism, I am prepared to die on the hill of dance being extremely physically demanding, and anyone who argues otherwise can tell that to my aching muscles.
And yet, the artistic and creative capacity of dance drives a rift between it and other more traditional sports. The capacity for dance to be enjoyed as a visual art and not as a judged competition leads lots of people to think twice about classifying it as a sport. Some would even go as far as to say that classifying dance as a sport is actually restrictive and takes away from its potential as an artform.
However, there is one crucial gift that the status of ‘sport’ bestows that ‘artform’ does not: funding. The arts are chronically and infamously underfunded and classifying dance as purely an artform restricts the resources available. Particularly in regards to university dance teams, excluding them from the status, funding, and resources that ‘true’ sports teams receive is highly detrimental. You need only attend a university dance competition and you will easily be able to pick out the universities that include their dance teams in the sports union by their flashy kit and their custom costumes — all the product of increased funding.
Ironically, I’m going to end this debate exactly where I began: dance is liminal. It exists both as a sport — particularly in its competitive forms — and as an artform in its performance-based forms. Excluding it from either category not only negatively impacts perceptions of dance, but has tangibly detrimental effects through reduction in access to resources. While I doubt we’ll ever see ballet in the Olympics (although breakdancing had its 15 minutes of fame), dance is both a sport and an artform; inherently transitive and obstinately refusing to abide by restrictive categorisation.
Photo by Mark Chan for the Student.