The Blackpool Dance Festival Fever

Blackpool Dance Festival – A Historical Event

If you are a dancer, for sure you’ve heard about the Blackpool Dance Festival as the most important competition of the year. It’s the goal of every couple to compete there. What makes Blackpool Dance Festival special and why dancers treat it different than other competitions? Because it’s the event that can change your career.

However, if you don’t know much about this historical event, the Blackpool Dance Festival is hosted in the historical Empress Ballroom in the Winter Gardens, Blackpool, England. The very first edition was in 1920. If you want to hear more about the history and what is happening around the Winter Gardens we wrote another article about our experience from last year here.

The Preparations

For many, Blackpool Dance Festival is the main event of the year and all the efforts go into preparing for this comp. The hard training sessions that you go through even up until a few days before the Festival starts are the recurrent dream and nightmare of the last days before the first round.

The music

The first sign of the Blackpool fever starts from February when the dancers will start to practice only on songs from the Empress Orchestra. It seems like they almost lost their other songs from their practice playlist and they dance only to Samba de la Torre, Kiss of fire, Scheherazade, or for the ballroom ones: Waltz for Lily and Dokman Tango.

In truth, practicing on these songs actually helps to create the right mindset and visualize yourselves on the Empress Ballroom dance floor. You can checks some of our other article on “How to Practice with a Vision” and “Mental Training”.

The looks

The second stage is all about the looks. The ladies getting into their form and the men working hard to get their best body. And new hairstyles are always a good idea.

The dress designers are having meetings after meetings with the dancers in order to create new costumes. Each year thousands of dresses fly on that floor, but you can’t find two identical. But no matter how early you start planning to make the new design and to create it, you will always get the costume in the last moment possible. Keeping the stress-level high enough is a tradition for this event.

The focus

Nevertheless, the highest pick of stress, anyway, will be on the last day before your first round. No matter how experienced you are or how well you organized all in the details of the trip. The day before is always giving you tension.

Everyone will experience this pressure differently, but the emotions will be there nonetheless. However, this is not necessarily a bad thing. Tension makes you focused and it prepares your mind to perform at your best. Before going on the floor be confident on the work you’ve done, on the hours spent on the dance floor, on yourself and your partner. Only positive vibes. It’s all you need to enjoy this comp and to express your best.

A Historical Moment In Your Career

This event will put a mark on your career and on how you perceive competitions. It might be the Empress Ballroom with its magnificence, or it might be the fact that the Blackpool Dance Festival is the most historical ballroom event counting its 94th edition this year. Certainly can be because you have watched so many videos from the past champions dancing on that same floor where you are about to dance.

Each and every one of us has a different reason why the Blackpool Festival is wrapped in this surreal aura. But what we surely can say is that all over the world, in May, dancers and teachers have the Blackpool fever.

 

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Italian, dancing since the age of 5 and currently based in Moscow. With his partner Ekaterina Utkina, he is in the top 50 WDSF Adult Standard World Ranking, representing the Russian Federation.


Tags: ballroom dancing Blackpool dance festival WDC

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