The performance high, the sigh of relief when you finish, and you can’t wait to do it again. The adrenaline high, the feeling of the team coming together, and the minute you walk onstage the whole mood changes. Getting a pep talk by your teacher before you go on stage, finishing that ending pose, the lights fade to black and you hear all the cheers and claps, and then you walk off stage to where you have teachers and other dancers congratulating you backstage and in the wing. Performance season is crunch time. It brings together the love of dance and the feeling of relief when you finally make it through. 

But it’s also… taxing physically and mentally. A new study out of Portugal showed that dance training is most likely associated with mental health problems. Dance involves discipline, physical demands, competitiveness, highly critical and perfectionist attitudes of not just students but trainers/teachers, and acceptance of emotional and physical suffering. Putting all these demands and problems on top of each other can result in negative consequences. With no-nothing time and time to breath during such performance seasons can often lead to missing out on important experiences. Evidence is also showing that the physical and mental strain are leading to injuries and feeling sick before performances.  

Dance causes perfectionism which then causes anxiety in everything you do. The constant practice of running through the whole show, perfecting every little detail, sometimes even throwing out certain parts and making something new and adding tricks, days or hours before the show, extra rehearsals, respacing, trying on costumes, fittings, and perfecting makeup and hair causing unbelievable stress and anxiety, literally, in the same way as preparing for a presentation in front of 25 of your peers. You're hoping everything will turn out good because there is a heightened fear of failure when you're part of the dance world. The dance world allowing unrealistic athletic standards causes harm to its growing body of students. 

Up until now pictures of dance look like it used to be more fun and not so competitive and draining. Everyone has a smile on their face and looks like they are having the time of their lives. They chose to dance. Nobody is forcing them like many parents do today. One example is the movies like Grease and The Sound of Music where everyone is having fun. Fast forward to today where more movies like Save the Last Dance or Bring It On show the stresses of dance based on competitions. 

Today dance is a lot more competitive. There is constant dance battles, improv challenges (who does the best job), performing in front of your peers and them voting on who did the best, and just the constant worry of embarrassing yourself by making a mistake, looking weak, forgetting a part of the dance, or doing facials and not doing facials in front of your peers. It’s a constant battle you're never going to win even though you learned the dance 30 minutes ago and you're just practicing. The sport that once offered delight now makes it feel like you're suffocating from the demands.