Are Gymnasts Dancers?

This is the first of 2 posts about dancing gymnasts.   In my opinion, dance skill has a lot to do with the success of a gymnastic routine.   As you know, I’m also very opinionated about dance and part of my criteria is that the dance is an expression of the music.  In this wonderful routine from the Ukrainian Olympic team, the women hit the music perfectly.  Like the reverse of dancers who use aerials with perfect timing, (see previous post Using Aerials in Swing Dance) these athletes use dance to accent their perfect lifts.  It’s all timed perfectly to the music and the routine is choreographed to take advantage of the breaks in the music.  As beautiful as it is impressive to watch, without using dance to play with the music, the gymnastic perfection would not have been nearly as effective in the overall performance.  Watch it now and see if you don’t agree!

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by LaurieAnn Lepoff

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