Judges, please take it easy with the choreographic commentary for minis, particularly 6 and under.
Really, I feel this hold consistent for all ages, not just minis, but for the sake of this point, I’ll stick with talking about the minis.
This dance competition season, I’ve listened to multiple critiques from judges asking for more complexity in my mini dances — mixing up the beat and adding syncopation, one even asking them to move parts of the set we’ve built for them.
Let me tell you, I would LOVE to give them harder choreography. If you gave me a five year old student that could understand syncopation (or even pronounce the word), I would be beyond thrilled. But even getting them to dance on the simple counts was a triumph; I didn’t choreograph dancing on simple beats because I lack the imagination to explore the musicality more. My options are simple beats, or chaos.
I have to meet my students where they are, and give them a dance that they can reasonably execute. And no, they cannot move the set because it is too heavy for them. And it’s heavy because we wanted it very sturdy as they are standing on it. These are all well-thought out decisions.
My hope in asking this is that judges don’t make snap decisions around our choreographic choices. Particularly with small children, us coaches are faced with a lot of limitations that nothing can fix, except for giving them the time to mature and grow.
And no, don’t tell me that the answer is to pull them out of competition. We have a responsibility to advocate for our dancers – the answer is to ask these spaces to do better by the youngest members of our dance community, not to ask them to go away.
It is disheartening to see points knocked off our choreography scores and receive commentary that treat these dancers like they are 15 and we are giving them elementary choreo. They are 5, elementary choreo is developmentally appropriate.
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