Is Dance a Sport, an Art, or Something Else?

Let’s be honest. I think the mindset around dance needs to change.

For a very long time, dance has predominantly been viewed as an art form or a cultural means of expression. And it absolutely is those things. There is no argument there. Dance tells stories, expresses emotion, carries history and culture, and gives people a way of communicating without necessarily saying a word.

But over the past few decades, particularly since the late 1990s, there has been a growing movement towards recognising dance as a sport as well. And I think this is where we sometimes get stuck. People still see someone dancing on a stage, dressed for a performance, expressing themselves through movement, and instinctively classify it as "the arts". But when that same person is training for hours, conditioning their body, developing technique, managing their nutrition, dealing with pressure and then competing against other highly trained dancers, the picture starts to look rather different.

I like to call them artistic athletes.

Because that is what I believe they are.

If that makes you uncomfortable, ask yourself a fairly simple question: why do we automatically recognise a gymnast or a figure skater as an athlete, but hesitate to give the same recognition to a dancer?

Think about what you are watching. A figure skater is moving to music, wearing a costume, telling a story through movement and being judged on their performance. A gymnast is performing routines that require incredible physical control, precision, strength, flexibility and artistry. There is certainly a sporting element, but there is also a very strong artistic and expressive element.

We don't generally look at those athletes and say, "Well, that's not really sport because they are performing."

So perhaps we need to question our own assumptions when it comes to dance.

Dance sits in an interesting place

One of the things I find fascinating about dance, particularly from an educational perspective, is that it brings together areas that our education system often treats as completely separate.

In South African schools, we generally have academics, sport, arts and culture. That structure makes sense and each of those areas has an important role to play. We need academic education. We need physical activity and sport. We need artistic expression. We need cultural education.

But dance has this rather unique ability to sit across all of those worlds at the same time. There is the physical side. A dancer needs strength, coordination, balance, flexibility, endurance, speed, control and body awareness. A high-level dancer trains their body in much the same way that any serious athlete has to train theirs. The fact that the end result happens to be choreographed and performed to music doesn't make the physical demands disappear.

Then there is the artistic side. A dancer isn't simply executing movements. They are interpreting music, expressing emotion, understanding performance quality and making creative decisions. There is a reason two dancers can perform exactly the same choreography and yet one can completely captivate an audience while the other doesn't quite connect.

And then there is culture.

This is particularly important in street dance because so many of the styles we teach have histories, communities and cultural contexts attached to them. When you learn a dance style properly, you are not simply learning a collection of movements. You are learning something about where it came from, the people who developed it and the circumstances that shaped it.

That history matters.

And suddenly, dance becomes a rather interesting educational package.

You are training the body, developing the mind, exploring creativity and learning about culture, often within the same class.

Perhaps the answer isn't either/or

I don't think we necessarily need to argue that dance is either a sport or an art.

That is probably missing the point.

You can separate the components if you want to. You can look specifically at the artistic side of dance, or study its cultural history, or analyse the physical and competitive demands of dance as a sport.

But when you put all of those things back together, you get what makes dance so special.

It is physical. It is creative. It is cultural. It can be competitive. It can be deeply personal. It can also be incredibly demanding.

And perhaps that is why the term artistic athlete makes sense to me.

A dancer can be an artist because they create and express.

They can be an athlete because they train, compete and push the physical limits of what the human body can do.

And they can be a student of culture because every dance has a story behind it.

So, is dance a sport?

I think that's a perfectly reasonable topic for debate.

But if we are going to debate it, let's at least look beyond the costume, the music and the performance. Look at the training. Look at the discipline. Look at the physical demands. Look at the mental strength required to walk onto a stage knowing that you are being judged. Look at the history and culture behind the movements.

Then perhaps the question becomes a little less about whether dance qualifies as sport, and more about why we ever thought these categories had to be mutually exclusive in the first place.