In Dance, Winner Gives All: On Sports and Competition

After having the National and American Football Championships as background while working and reading over past posts, another valuable lesson that dance has to teach us came up for me. Dance offers an alternative to the dualistic notion of competition found in sports. Dancers train intensely but not for quantitative, scientific or competitive goals. Instead, dancers train their bodies to create a means of being more qualitative, emotive, articulate and expressive human beings.

In the field of dance, there is still camaraderie , intense training, and public acknowledgment of talents and gifts. Where dance differs from the world of sports is in its rejection of the dualistic notion of winners and losers, quantitative notions of a first place, second place, and third place winner. Dance provides a complexity of experience, not a uniform or repetitive sensation of joy or disappointment when the team of choice either wins or loses. Instead, audience members are faced with more complex quandaries than who won the contest. Audience members of dance experience emotional reactions, ponder questions, and admire the potential for fuller expression of human nature and physiological articulation of the human body. Whether this is a positive or negative experience for the audience member, it is in fact very different from that of competition. Dance calls upon the viewer to experience complex constellations of emotion such as apathy, anger, impatience, humor, sorrow and passion.

In this way, dance is inclusive. It is inclusive of all voices through which the dance is performed, processes by which dance is created and reactions by those experience the dance. There is no one final winner in dance that excludes and obscures all who lose. Notions of facts and figures, statistics, and unilateral results are not primary to the field of dance. There is space for many dancers to express themselves. In these spaces, dancers are honored and revered, not for being the winners in their field but for articulating something about the human condition that has never been expressed in that exact way before. There is enough room for all of those who commit to the process of creating dance to be appreciated and admired for doing so.

Now of course I am not oblivious to the idea of how people create a hierarchy of performers, choreographers, and companies within the dance community. I would argue, though, that this hierarchy is a symptom of the dualistic, hierarchical, Cartesian world-view in which we all live and not a part of the nature of dance itself. Before there was Western concert dance, people danced as a means to express uniqueness of self or a group identity. In cultural contexts other than Western concert dance, many dances were performed in a way that all could be included and honored. There was no winner who was set above all others in these inclusive forms of cultural dance forms. Instead there was a collective of individuals whose unique place in the larger community only strengthened the whole. Dance offers solace to those beaten down by the aggression, dualist thinking, and “winner takes all” mentality of competitive sports. It offers people a place where their voices can be heard, where the individual competes with their best self not with others. It is a place where there can be more than one “winner.” The winner in dance is the person who finds effective and creative ways to better articulate their bodies and their message. Dance’s potential to honor the voice of each and every individual is another invaluable gift it offers society.