At dance competitions, participants from the same studio often end up not just performing alongside but also competing against each other in solos and group routines—all within the same weekend. The situation can be stressful, confusing, and awkward, particularly for younger dancers. But it doesn’t have to result in comparisons and tears.

As youngsters, my brother, Gregory, and I went to the Apollo Theater in Harlem to watch tap greats like Teddy Hale, Bunny Briggs, the Step Brothers and Coles & Atkins. Most of those guys would come on the stage and just tap.

Judging dance competitions demands a unique blend of skills, from articulating useful corrections on the fly to staying focused for hours at a time. With just a few minutes to see and score each routine, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed by everything you may want to say—or, worse, to have nothing to say at all. Here’s how to stay organized, alert, and constructive during long judging days.

Despite your most valiant efforts, costume mishaps are going to happen from time to time, and your students need to know how to handle them. The most important priority is protecting the dancer.

Dancers stack their calendars with in-person classes, competitions and social commitments. Read for advice on balancing a busy schedule, or determining when—and what—to cut back.

Improvisation is a skill that can be learned, and it’s one that is becoming increasingly crucial for dancers in nearly any style.

Advice is tricky. It can be presumptuous, judgmental. Medicinal. Obligatory. Revelatory? I don’t consider myself to be an advice giver, and yet I regularly share a morsel that one of my college professors gave me two decades ago: “When you find a teacher you admire, even if not an educator in the formal sense, go […]

Finding your balance can sometimes feel like making a new discovery every day. “Emotions play a huge part in balance,” says Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater dancer Belén Indhira Pereyra. “Where is your state of mind that day? Something could be happening in the family world or in the friendship world—or internally. Maybe you ate […]