Well, that certainly wouldn't include you, would it?

You are commiting the rhetorical fallacy of arguing from a basis of authority. You have no such basis. You don't even have a partner.


Again, this a statement that you cannot substantiate other than through an appeal to elitism.

Also, because you define a serious competitor as one who hires all of these "world-class" coaches, this argument is pretty silly.

Championship skills are built by practice. Period.



jj

"It's not speculation, it's fact, as anyone who is part of the real dance world well knows.

Well, that certainly wouldn't include you, would it?"

After pointing out in the other thread that your experience is in a backwater of the dance world dominated and limited by the overmarketing of pro/am, perhaps you should stop making ASSUMPTIONS about the habits of serious professional and amateur competitors...

"Championship skills are built by practice. Period."

If you want to see what practice alone creates, look at average professional couples at less important competitions - highly rehearsed, but still very inefficient. In comparison, rising to the top in either division requires not only heavy practice, but expert guidance to focus that practice on more optimal technique.

Again, you're simply revealing the mindset of people who have bought into a self-justifying feedback loop.

You are identifying the "best couples" as those with the highest finishes in competitions. You also identify these same people as those who have hired the judges who are placing them first for extra coaching.

Gee, isn't it just a bit possible that these finishes are based on something other than the quality of performance?

Ask a top level Latin dancer if he or she honestly believes that Bill Sparks and Kimberly Mitchell were truly the best Latin couple in the US at any time.



jj

"You are identifying the "best couples" as those with the highest finishes in competitions. You also identify these same people as those who have hired the judges who are placing them first for extra coaching."

I don't define them exclusively by results, but their their results are in the majority of cases quite consistent regardless if the judges they take coaching with are engaged to work at a particular competition or not. Most of those coaches are not booked to judge run of the mill competitions anyway - you might occasionally get one or two of them, but you generally won't get a full panel of world class judges outside an event of national or international scope.

Plus you only need to watch them with your own eyes to see that their dancing is fundamentally better - not just rehearsed, but better.

Unless these judges publish lists of their clients, there is no way to support such a judgment. Your overused whine that "real dancers" just know this to be true is meaningless.


If this statement is true then we don't need to continue to use teachers as judges and your entire argument about a limited pool of judging talent is nonsense.



jj

"Unless these judges publish lists of their clients, there is no way to support such a judgment."

It is no great mystery to those in the midst of things who various couples are studying with.

"Plus you only need to watch them with your own eyes to see that their dancing is fundamentally better - not just rehearsed, but better.

If this statement is true then we don't need to continue to use teachers as judges"

We need expert judges for the cases that aren't so obvious. Ironically, they tend to get used more for the situations that are obvious.

You also neglect to consider the ways that dancing can adapt to judging.

The lack of uniformally expert panels at trivial competitions may shape the goals of lower dancers, but it does not affect the more serious ones, who treat such competitions as practice or easy prize money, not an actual goal. But everywhere replace the dancing and teaching experts with non-participants who judge out of a manual, and dancing will probably grow to satisfy the committee-written manual (as skating has) rather than to satisfy those who are a participatory part of it.

OK. Name some people. And tell us the name of your amateur partner while you're at it. My partner is Sandy.


In truth, I have dealt with what is the primary course by which "dancing adapts to judging": money.


Non-teachers are not the same as non-participants. There are experienced amateurs who would make perfectly competent judges.



jj

"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.