My lovely wife loves DWTS and enjoy watching it with her. While I have picked up a few things over the years I am looking for something that would give me better guidance in evaluating dances.

I can find a slew of videos on learning how to dance but I am having difficulty finding videos on appreciating and judging dances.

Does anyone have any recommendations please?

Thank you.

I'm not surprised that there are no videos. Judges are dancers. You can't judge if you don't understand what you are looking at or looking for. That takes experience.

DWTS is a popularity contest, this is NOT what you will see at a real ballroom competition nor is it really how one is judged.

Judges look for poise and posture. Are you moving through space? Are you rolling through your feet? Are you using your ankles? Are you using CBM? Does your dance have breath? Are you turning over your post? Your leg moves faster than your body. Your arm is your body.

All of these terms are best understood when you are taking lessons.

Judges are NOT going to put out a video on this - THIS is want they are paid to go over when doing refinement coaching with students. It's part of their livelihood.

If you want to see a REAL ballroom competition you can look them up. In the U.S. google NDCA ballroom calendar. All comps in the U.S. for the year will come up. Find one in your state.
When you find one click on the web site for the dates & Times. You will have to e-mail the organizer to get spectator ticket prices. Day tickets are less then evening tickets. You can generally buy them at the window the day of the comp.

Dance programs of this nature, have little or nothing to do with BR style comps. These show's are for entertainment value, and do not reflect the nature of the dances in am more controlled content environment .

I am an adjudicator, and judging is essentially "opinion" .There is a litany of criteria that "we " use when judging, and it comes down to knowledge gained over multi years in the BR genre's, and that, is from which we draw our conclusions . .

As others have pointed out, DWTS scores have little to do with how real ballroom competitions are judged. At the risk of getting off-topic, here are some thoughts on why. While the announcers say that the judges' scores and the public's scores are given equal weight in the final total, those scores are arrived at differently. It isn't hard to see that the public has more influence on the result than the judges (it's a popularity contest). Without going into the details, there is little spread in the votes from the judges, so the last-place contestant doesn't get a much worse number than the first-place contestant. But nothing limits the spread of votes from the public, so the public's opinion influences the result more than the judges' opinion. That's how a contestant ranked highly by the judges can get eliminated. BUT (here is the point) it appears that sometimes the judges tailor their votes--and associated comments--to influence how the public votes. This means that their criteria are considerably different from those employed by the judges in real ballroom competitions.