All Ireland Dance Intervarsities

In all the dance competitions I’ve been to, I’ve never felt that my team was the sole victim of bias judging…until this one. Last year at Intervarsities, UL Dance blew them away in every category. This year, not only was half our squad not allowed to compete, due to rule changes based on rumors about our squad, but we were also treated rudely by many of the dancers there. The competition was completely wrapped up in politics and biases, but that didn’t stop us from having a blast (complete with karaoke at a pub the first night there).

The jazz that we competed was to Bloc Party’s “Hunting for Witches”. The concept was that we were all driven mad by looking for answers to why the world is in the state that it’s in today. 

 

The contemporary that we competed was to Hawksley Workman’s “Addicted”. This piece had four characters: an addiction, an addict, and two supporters aka therapist and friends.

We took second in jazz and third in contemporary. Although these aren’t bad places at all, we deserved better, and members of the audience weren’t shy about telling us so. At the beginning of the competition, I calmed one of the dancers down by saying, “Don’t worry about winning, just dance it so everyone walks away thinking we should have won.” I think we all almost welled up with tears every time people approached us and said “You should have won.” We performed spectacularly and I hope the videos get online soon so I can share them.