Life Cycle Of A Showdance

In the UCWDC, Classic Masters are required to dance at least 5 of 8 dances, danced in two separate flights: Smooth Flight and Rhythm Flight. We don't know what songs are going to be played for those 8 dances, so our choreography for those 8 dances is done in such a way that it will fit with most any song.

We are also required to dance a Showdance. The Showdance is a 2 1/2 minute dance of your choice (from the 8 dances we use in the UCWDC), to a song of your choice. The dance doesn't have to have a theme, but it can. In my mind, the Showdance is a time for Classic Masters to express a little bit more of their personalities. You can play a little bit more with the tempo and the character of your chosen dance.

You are not required to dance both flights and a Showdance at every competition, but doing so qualifies you as having danced a "full program". And only those couples who danced a full program are eligible for prize money. So you can see why Richard and I try to have a full program ready at all times!

While Classic Masters normally keep the same choreography from year to year in their flight dances, the Showdance tends to change each year. I'm going to let you in on how a Showdance goes from birth to adulthood. Masters have one year to get their Showdance to World Championship shape.

The World Championships are the first week of January, and Richard and I usually take the rest of the month off from each other when we get back home. October-December are spent in feverish rehearsal, so by Jan 10th we're over each other. We usually start rehearsing again in February. Our first competition is Baltimore in March, so we only have a month or so to come up with a new Showdance.

This year, Richard and I chose to do East Coast Swing for our Showdance. I found a song that we liked, and we needed to have something to put on the floor by March. So in February we took our old ECS flight choreography and danced it to our chosen song. We tweaked a few places, added an intro and an ending, and bam! we had our first draft of a Showdance. Showdance v1.0.

Here is how our first version looked back in March. Throughout the year, I'll post the Showdance each time we dance it, so you can see the subtle changes it goes through before it reaches fighting condition in January, ready to be put on the World Championship floor.

Showdance Baltimore from Suzanne Mosley on Vimeo.

It's very hard for me to watch this, as we've made so many changes since March. A few changes were major, we changed the entire intro and added another trick section in the middle, but most of the changes have been subtle: changes to HOW we dance certain parts. It's so much better already that I almost can't watch this version

We're dancing it again in Montreal this weekend, and you should be able to see a lot of changes in version 2.0 when I post it next week.