Every time the topic of dance comes up, my friends always ask me if I think it’s a sport. I used to think it was obvious, of course! Dance requires strength and effort, something every sport needs. But at the end of the day, everyone always ends up saying, “Yeah, dance is really cool! But isn’t it more of an art than a sport?”

Yes dance requires creativity; it needs to convey a story to the audience, which is why people may think dance leans more towards the fine arts. But what people don’t see is that under all the elegance, fluid movements, and beautiful leaps and turns, there is stamina, endurance, and a lot of effort put into it. 

When dancers dance, their job is to make what they put on stage look effortless and beautiful, but this doesn’t just come easily. Just like any other sport, dance takes time to master and put on stage, making it look easy doesn’t mean that it isn’t any less physical. 

They dance from as little as 6 hours per week, to possibly 24 hours in a week for advanced dancers, showing that they put a lot of time into perfecting their dance. Along with this, dancing is known as a great way to burn calories since it’s not only fun, but efficient too. Depending on the type of dance, someone could burn 534 calories in thirty minutes, compared to an hour of a sport like basketball, which burns from 575-775 calories. In addition, to be able to turn multiple times or leap with height, dancers also do weight training and conditioning. This builds muscle, balance, and the stamina dancers need to perform.

By definition, dance is a sport; it requires a lot of physical exertion, and there are dance competitions where teams and individuals compete. The difference is, instead of watching two teams compete, there are multiple dances competing. These dances are based on genre, number of dancers, and age, and each dance is scored by a panel of judges. 

Although dance competitions aren’t like normal sports competitions, that doesn’t mean dance isn’t a sport; it just means that dancing needs to be scored differently. While a usual sporting competition like basketball or football has four quarters to show what they’ve been working on and win a game, dancers have two minutes to show the judges all the work they’ve put in, and that’s hard. Despite these differences, dance is still a sport. 

However, unlike sports that use objective scoring like time and points, dance is judged through a more subjective process based on things like technique, showmanship, and artistry.

Something people also say is that although dance is highly physical, dancers don’t usually aim to win; they want to tell a story, which makes dancing a performing art instead of a sport. But all dances convey different stories, and aim to do different things with the dance they worked for hours on, and some dancers use that emotion so they can win. 

I’ve always wondered why dance couldn’t just be both a performing art and a sport. At the end of the day, dance is a beautiful form of art, and dancers work hard in the studio multiple hours a week, perfecting their routines, training until they have the strength and elegance to perform all the skills they have, and all that goes toward a dance where they get the chance to showcase their work for a few minutes. But behind all that beauty, there’s conditioning, discipline, physical exertion, all these things that sports also include. So, yes, dance is a performing art, telling a unique story that only they can tell, but dance is also a sport.