Professional Division of DanceSport

Overview

Professional sports are sports in which participants are financially remunerated for the time they spend competing or training.

In the majority of sports which feature professionals, the professionals will participate at a higher standard of performance than amateur competitors. However, the majority of worldwide sporting participants are amateurs. Even though this is so, Professional DanceSport competitors who were once in the Amateur Division of DanceSport have mostly likely won and received remuneration for lessons, shows and wins, much prior to their change of status.

The History & The Difference in DanceSport

AMATEUR VS. PROFESSIONAL

To make the most rigorous distinction between a professional and an amateur in sports was, above all, an Anglo-Saxon axiom. At the turn of the twentieth century – and in sports like athletics, golf and tennis – such distinctions were made more from a societal point of view than anything else. Sports were the privilege of an upper class that could afford to practice them for pleasure only. Earning one’s living through dexterity, skills and physical virtues was considered inappropriate in the “working class” not only in the United Kingdom of the Victorian era, but elsewhere too.

PROFESSIONAL VS. AMATEUR

The first competitive dancers, however, had no reservations about declaring themselves professionals. Many were teaching dance and enterprising in related ventures. To be a professional seemed perfectly acceptable for the pioneers who hardly considered dance to be sport.

While sporting amateurism remained a zealously guarded ideal until the 1960s, professionalism was the coveted status and synonymous with mastery in dance. When the German Imperial Association for the Fostering of Social Dance initiated the founding of the International Federation for Amateur Dancers in 1935, it was a counter movement of sorts to the rule by British dance professionals.

This “amateur” division was adopted in the name of the organization that later became the World DanceSport Federation as well. The International Council of Amateur Dancers founded in 1957 was to contrast with the International Council of Ballroom Dancing (today known as the World Dance Council), the organization which dance teachers had founded in 1950.

Putting nearly all emphasis on the distinction between amateur and professional status had made for some irreconcilable differences between two opposing groups over many years.

AMATEUR & PROFESSIONAL

Today, perspectives have changed. Every dancer turning professional looks back at a successful career as an “amateur.” The quotation marks are perfectly in order: such status does no longer exist! The new professional will have won and received remuneration for lessons, shows and wins, much prior to his or her change of status.

In DanceSport competitions such as The World Games and the Asian Games, etc., athletes from both divisions unite and contest for the same titles. Both amateurs and professionals have drawn much closer to their levels of dancing, even to a point that distinguishing between them is probably the hardest part.

Hear it from the Pros

What does change is the approach taken to dance itself. A change of attitude as much as a change of style! The two World DanceSport Federation Professional Division World Champion couples explain the difference between the Amateur Division of DanceSport.

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