Dance As Sport Or As Art?- the big debate
Dance is an expression, a sport, a genre, a lot of things define this form that it is quite easy to determine what it is exactly. There has been a lot of speculation that dance genres such as barley are sports. Whereas there have been several claims disputing this to be nothing but hoaxes. A lot of people believe that a sport is something that engages your body and contributes in some way to your physical fitness. Well if you are a professional dancer and don’t just do it for the social pull then you will agree with how much bodywork there is in making a dancer.
Dance has been used over time stumps as a way to express emotions both professionally or not-professionally. There is a way an artist would maybe sketch what they feel that a dancer may not be able to physically represent ( I mean have you ever seen the Starry Night?) but in its own way dance expresses emotions in ways that can only be considered artistic.
Besides showing emotion, dance has also been used as a retreat just like poetry or songwriting. It is just a therapeutical as any other form of art or sport that exists out there. Dance has been seen to shape up drug addicts and former gang members into more civilized versions of themselves in any way that boxing or Karate can help a person reclaim their anger and sense of imbalance within their life.
Now the amount of practice and exercise that is plowed into any dancer is almost as equivalent to any training that a sportsman would undergo. This is not to say that every dancer is equivalently as tough as any boxer no, but every sport has its way of training that greatly differs from another. This could qualify dance a sport wouldn’t you agree?
Every dancer struggles so much to make sure that their new form is both appealing and new. This is no different from any other lyrical genius out there who works on their new songs or poems just to make sure that they are better or different from the contents that others would create. This makes dance just as much an art as any other form of art is.
So, the final verdict; is dance art or a sport?
Due to the above evidence, it is safe to say that dance can be uniquely categorized as both. Whereas there are a lot of matters that could make the genre not be classified as neither, the line between both is very narrow. Dance is both a sport and art, there is no doubt about that. It claims the same amount of physical input that most sports do while also ensuring that it depends on the same amount of creativity that most artistic pieces require.