Correct level placement is necessary for maintaining a key factor in our company philosophy – a fair event. Breakout Dance Competition values and respects our judging panel and their opinions in helping to maintain a fun, fair, and professional competitive environment. What we found over the years is that there have been many industry concerns about fairness and performance levels, and in order for our competition to be fair for all dancers, we need to ensure that dancers are being placed in the appropriate levels. While we have always allowed our judging panels to evaluate the performance levels throughout the competition, we wanted to ensure that all studios are aware of this being our company policy. While this is not the first year we are doing this, it is something we wanted to bring attention to as this has become an especially sensitive topic in the past year.
There are many factors that go into determining a dancer’s appropriate level placement, and we understand the desire for a hard and fast ruling on what equates to a true Beginner, Up & Coming, and Celebrity dancer. That being said, we do not believe that a list of set skills necessarily equates to correct level placement. A polished, experienced, pre-professional level group of dancers with intricate choreography can execute a Celebrity level dance flawlessly and score extremely high without doing a single skill that would typically be on a pre-determined list of skills for a certain level. This dance, if placed in the Beginner level, should be bumped to the Celebrity level, but it would be bumped without having ever executed anything on the skill set list, so technically, if the skill set list were part of our rules, this dance could stay in the Beginner level. On the flip side, dancers with an unpolished routine, a lack of musicality, and low performance quality could execute a double pirouette poorly in the Beginner level and be appropriately placed, even if “double pirouette” was on the list of skills for an Up & Coming dancer. If “double pirouette” was on our list of skills for an Up & Coming dancer, these Beginner level dancers would have to, according to the skill set rule, be bumped to the Up & Coming level. There are also dancers that take gymnastics classes outside of the studio hours and are able to execute high-level acro skills, but their baseline dance technique level is still at a Beginner or Up & Coming level. If these high-level skills were on the Celebrity level skill set list, these Beginner or Up & Coming dancers would have to be bumped to the Celebrity level. As we hope you can understand, pigeon-holing levels using a skill set list does make it difficult for our judges to fairly assess correct level placement.
Instead of using skills as a bench-mark for level placement, our judges are trained to assess levels in the following way…