Competitive dancers can practice at least nine hours every single week, or condition to train endurance for up to an hour each time they’re in the studio. They push the human body to its physical peak, while still striving to appear effortless on stage. Despite the physical demands of dance, many members both inside and outside the community debate whether it should be classified as a sport, art or both.  

Dance is widely regarded as a performing art, where dancers seek to forge connections with their audiences through storytelling and expression. Simultaneously, to deliver such mesmerizing performances, dancers must deftly execute their routines, masking the physical rigor behind their moves to highlight the emotions of the piece. Achieving this level of proficiency requires the diligent training and dedication found in sports.

“On stage, you’re supposed to make it look easy,” Harker Dance Company co-captain Yasmin Sudarsanam (11) said. “That’s the whole point, which makes people think that it is easy to put these pieces on stage, but it’s definitely not. If anyone actually saw what goes on behind the scenes of a rehearsal, or tried taking a class themselves, they would be convinced that dance is a sport.”

Many members of Harker’s dance groups, Harker Dance Company and Kinetic Krew, not only attend their dance class period during the school day but also dedicate additional hours training at competitive studios outside of school, a time commitment similar to that of commonly-recognized sports. Further, dancers’ extreme range of motion and fine motor control rivals the skills of typical sports like strength and speed, although it may not be as visible due to stylistic differences. 

“To tell the story with your full body, you really have to use your movement well,” competitive dancer at The Academy of Chinese Performing Arts Selina Wang (10) said. “You require a system to be able to control a certain part of your body without the others. In order to tell the story, a dancer needs that technical aspect, so you have to train. That’s the same with a lot of sports where you have to learn skills and then have games where you demonstrate those skills.” 

Asserting the athletic merits of dance does not require negating its performance aspects. Kinetic Krew co-captain Kuga Pence highlighted how dance’s hidden physical training process translates into powerful movements on the stage. 

“In choreography, what is stressed is creating pictures or a story for the audience to capture and make their own,” Kuga said. “That is an element that is present in all forms of art: allowing the viewers to create their own opinions and just enjoy whatever is being presented to them.”

The debate amounts to far more than a classification. Dance’s perception as a non-sport leads to a dearth of resources for the field, from the lack of funding for professional dance teams to the absence of a competitive college structure for dancing. Because the National Collegiate Athletics Association does not recognize dance as a competitive sport, collegiate dancers often fundraise to support their own team.

Dance teacher Rachelle Haun used to dance competitively and later transitioned to cheerleading for the Las Vegas Raiders. During her time as a cheerleader, she noticed significant disparities in the treatment of injuries for football players and cheerleaders. 

“Sports have more support when it comes to injuries,” Haun said. “Working in the NFL, when there are injuries with the football team, they would have people to support them and physical therapists helping them. When you injure yourself in a professional atmosphere in dance, you either dance through the pain or you don’t get the job. There’s no help for you.” 

Despite these challenges, dance has gained more support in the past decades. Popular competition-style shows like Dancing with the Stars and So You Think You Can Dance paint dance in the same rigorous light as traditional sports. Further, the International Olympic Committee recognized ballroom and Latin dancing as sports in 1997. The 2024 Paris Olympics will even feature breakdancing as an event, providing a platform for dance to gain more formal athletic recognition. 

Seeking to place dance in one box or the other often proves diminutive. Many dancers assert that neither the athletic nor artistic aspects can be removed from each other. Instead, dancers strive to balance the two — a unique challenge. 

“If you do dances that don’t have the athleticism, they’re not very much fun to watch,” Haun said. “Part of the joy of watching dance and creating dance is pushing the body to do things that you wouldn’t normally see. You can’t really have one without the other.”