2020 Accomplishments: Modified Team Activities
by Norm Ramil, 8CA main person and dance team fan
12/31/20 4:15pm
OK, so this post is going up with just a few hours left in that steaming pile of compost known as 2020. But I’m still up for celebrating all of the good stuff that the dance community accomplished this year. Lemme throw a multi-paragraph shoutout to Illinois’ dance teams for what they did to modify their usual experiences, all in order to make the best of a rough situation.
One theme that kept coming up during my undergrad studies in broadcast communications was that if you could successfully do a LIVE radio or tv event, then you could handle ANYTHING. Life gets so real when you know there’s no do-overs…no re-editing…no “take 2″…and an audience that will absolutely notice any mistakes. Of course dance teams can easily relate to this for obvious reasons, but let me extend the analogy even further:
If you dance teams were able to adapt, survive, wait, adjust, sacrifice, and even thrive during a year like 2020, you can pretty much handle ANYTHING.
Besides dodging the very real danger of catching or spreading the virus, I think the ugly enemy lurking in every shadow this year was uncertainty. For a sport where your actual on-the-court time is around 120 to 150 seconds of a rehearsed performance, with no opposing athlete to get in your way, there are just a couple big uncertainties on comp day: will our team perform it well? Will the judges score it accurately?
Every little thing about dance team life suddenly became uncertain. We in Illinois got crazy-lucky to sneak in both state contests before the pandemic hit high gear in March and April (other states, plus college teams, weren’t so fortunate). Tryout dates, locations, and formats were already up in the air by March. All of the spring projects for dance programs also had their timelines thrown into chaos: picking music, finding a choreographer, choosing and ordering costumes, learning the choreo, mastering skills, conditioning, team-building, community service…the list goes on and on.
The often overlooked thing about this year-long process for dance teams is that one project depends on another. You’ll need your concept down before ordering those costumes, for example. Suddenly coaches had to collaborate more closely with ADs and administrators, having to explain and enlighten people outside of the dance community about the importance of open gyms, parade arrangements, and getting their camp deposits back. I’m just hoping that at least more of the decision makers in high school athletics got to learn a bit more about what it takes to put a serious routine in front of judges, and what it’s like to make that happen over 8 or 9 months.
But, man, the uncertainty! Do you hold out hope for in-person tryouts and postpone them? Do you go ahead and settle for virtual tryouts, knowing you’re probably evaluating candidates way imperfectly? It was all a giant ball of guesstimating, hoping, and waiting. What would summer be like? When would “IHSA summer” even be? How much effort do we put into prepping for camp? Football sidelines and halftime? Would there even be a competitive season?
But in tackling all of those questions, here’s where I think Illinois’ dance teams really shined.
No matter where you stood on the “wait for tryouts?” question, you guys took your team meetings to the virtual format. Getting to know your teammates, laying down team rules, running through team traditions–it’s all about team-building in the spring and summer. You dance teams made it happen, at first virtually, and then in-person when Covid-19 took its foot off the gas pedal during mid-summer.
I saw teams take on fun challenges on social media. College teams and studios offered virtual workshops and mini classes. It looked like every dancer had a newly-mastered skill or trick to document on Insta or TikTok! Alums taught combinations and technique, and while on the rough side, it was definitely a legit way for teams to grow as much as they could under the circumstances.
And for that brief window when teams could get together in-person, I saw a lot of teams totally doing their best to maintain social distancing and keep things safe (not just for them, but for the people they’d be in contact with away from practice). This was the kind of sacrifice that makes me proud to be your fan. To make team progress happen, you all put aside so much, and I know it wasn’t easy: close formations, hands-on technique corrections, all the experiences of going to camp, and maybe even your personal political beliefs.
That willingness to adjust, to tough it out, to be patient, to think of others above yourself — these are all qualities that I’ve witnessed in dance teams over the decades. They’ve never been so visible as they’ve been in this misery-drenched year of 2020. Yeah, you guys definitely got good at using the collage feature on your phone apps, muting and unmuting yourselves during meetings, and tuning into those Rockettes livestreams and doing the combo before eventually becoming just a “viewer” by the 4th eight count.
But what I’m really in awe of is your toughness, adaptability, sacrifice, and heart. Bring that spirit forward into 2021 and you’ll be able to handle all the ordinary stuff of an ordinary dance season!