"There are experienced amateurs who would make perfectly competent judges."

The problem is that you have to have a standard for deciding who is eligible to be a judge.

If you don't do it based on someone's own competition history or work experience, then you have to do it based on something else, like an exam.

Soon this leads to what they have in skating - not just a system for qualifying judges, but a system of educating and guiding them in what they are supposed to look for and how they are supposed to score it.

And then you have what I was warning about: a situation where dancing changes itself to match what gets you the most points in this formalized system of criteria that all the judges have to follow.

I hope we avoid that - I hope we keep being judged by fellow artists who use their own experience and artistic judgment as a guide. And I hope that we will continue dancing for that audience, and not adapting to please an audience of robots with a checklist and a table of point values.

Anonymous. An Amateur cannot judge a competition. Neither can a Professional unless they have served an apprenticeship. In fact in two weeks time all adjudicators must attend a Seminar in Melbourne otherwise they will no longer be eligable to judge. Thats the way it is here. Unless you have some rafferty rules there, it should be the same.
If untrained Amateurs were allowed to judge I can only imagine what sort of results would be forthcoming.

"Anonymous. An Amateur cannot judge a competition."

In some situations they are allowed to judge non-championship events. Obviously this is something that will vary from sanctioning organization to sanctioning organization.

"Neither can a Professional unless they have served an apprenticeship."

Again, this varies from situation to situation.

"In fact in two weeks time all adjudicators must attend a Seminar in Melbourne otherwise they will no longer be eligable to judge."

And this is the start of what I was expressing concern about - the replacement of personal artistic judgment with a set of imposed criteria. Once the judges are judging from fixed criteria, the dancing changes to satisfy those and neglect other areas.

I much prefer the traditional state of affairs in dancing : each judge has slightly different criteria or gives different amounts of importance to different areas.

Anonymous. If as you seem to think that Amateurs in your country can judge competitions. Then there is little hope of having a healthy competition scene in your country.
These are the rules in my country
Page 41. An Adjudicator's Licence shall only be granted to people who hold a current valid adjudicator's accreditation issued by the Accreditation Commission. Actually I think you might have been misinformed or somebody or group have been breaking the rules.. We had a situation here where an Amateur Ballroom Champion at a Sporting Club was asked to judge an enter on the floor, nothing serious competition. It wasn't even Ballroom . It was Rock and Roll. The authorities hit him with a lengthy ban. So he immediately turned Professional and later won his same title as a Professional.

"Why else would a couple travel a total of 2000 miles when they are a better dancer than that judge,"

That sounds more like a problem in judge selection than in corruption.

This is the kind of thing that will only happen more frequently if you move to having politically qualified judges without personal dance expertise - instead of having the true experts (by and large the same people as the desirable coaches) do the judging.

This attitude of yours that the best judges are the same people as the best teachers simply reflects the mindset that you have developed to justify the approach that you have taken in dancing.

That same thinking also holds that the best dancers are always the best teachers, a proposition that is refuted simple by reversing its elements.



jj

"This is the kind of thing that will only happen more frequently if you move to having politically qualified judges without personal dance expertise - instead of having the true experts (by and large the same people as the desirable coaches) do the judging.

"This attitude of yours that the best judges are the same people as the best teachers... That same thinking also holds that the best dancers are always the best teachers"

You have a nasty habit of reading things that have not been said.

What I said was, "the true experts (by and large the same people as the desirable coaches)"

This is different from what you imagined I said in two key respects:

1) "by and large" does not equal "are always"

2) I did not say that the best dancers are the best teacher. I compared those desirable as JUDGES to those desirable as COACHES. Both skills can well leverage personal dance ability, but both require externalizing it to a situation that one is not physically a part of - which is one of the major areas where good dancers may fail in judging or coaching.

It's close enough that the meaning is essentialy the same.


I never said that you did (now who is "reading things that have not been said"?). I simply used this proposition to demonstrate your lack of logic.


Desirable according to whom and on what basis? Desirable because of their familiarity with your "dancing" thanks to those sesssions for which you paid inflated fees?

You cannot externalize ability; you can only externalize experience. You have put yourself into a position where you must argue that teaching experience makes one a better judge than dancing experience alone.

I'll give you an example from a comp that I attended earlier this year. I was with a different partner then, a very young woman with only a year's experience, almost none of it in Latin.

As we watched the Latin competitions, this supposedly unknowledgeable dancer correctly identified the winning couple in four of the five heats that we observed (I only picked two) and these were closely matched competitions.



jj

"1) "by and large" does not equal "are always"

It's close enough that the meaning is essentialy the same."

No, it's not. One states a general case but allows for exceptions. The other does not permit exceptions.

"2) I did not say that the best dancers are the best teacher.

I never said that you did (now who is "reading things that have not been said"?). I simply used this proposition to demonstrate your lack of logic."

But the proposition that you used was not one I made, instead it's something different that you made up.

"I compared those desirable as JUDGES to those desirable as COACHES.

Desirable according to whom and on what basis?"

Desired as coaches by top professional and amateur couples.

"You have put yourself into a position where you must argue that teaching experience makes one a better judge than dancing experience alone."

I have not made that claim.

What I have said is that the there's a large overlap between the people desirable in both roles - they tend to be good at them for the same reason.

"I'll give you an example from a comp that I attended earlier this year. I was with a different partner then, a very young woman with only a year's experience, almost none of it in Latin.

As we watched the Latin competitions, this supposedly unknowledgeable dancer correctly identified the winning couple in four of the five heats that we observed (I only picked two) and these were closely matched competitions."

Yes, sometimes it's fairly easy.

Sometimes it isn't.

And your example still ignores the flaw I made earlier, that you are seeing dancing that is targeted to the usual need to satisfy relatively experience-expert judges. If the dancers knew they were always going to be judged by non-dancers off the street, or alternately by bureaucrats with a technical merit point table, the character of their dancing might well change over time from what it is now. That's not just speculation - it's happened in skating.

Nowhere in this thread or on this board have I suggested using "non-dancers off the street" to judge dance competitions. If you're going to use a "straw man" argument you need to find one that is at least in the realm of possibility.

Guess what? Dancing is going to change over time whether new judging rules are created or not. Currents come and go in all human activity, organized or not.

I strongly suspect - and have seen no reason to believe otherwise - that the judges whom you claim to be desirable as coaches are so desirable not because of their dancing expertise but because they can affect the outcome of a competition.

I know for a fact that judges in pro/am competitions have told competitors to use certain teachers if they want better scores.

As another poster - I think that it was Ginger pointed out - this aspect of dance competition is just one giant feedback loop.



jj