Outline

Scope of Project

I used to dance pre-professionally in ballet and jazz up until I was about 15. I have since moved to Lion Dancing. However, this project is about my time in this pre-professional setting and how it drastically changed when I left. When I was in middle school, I participated in my first and last dance competition. This dance competition was in a small city, and there were a number of dance studios from around Pennsylvania. I remember seeing quite a scandalous performance that even my mother commented on the appropriateness. After that one competition, my mother and I mutually decided to pull out of the competition program at my dance studio. However, the power this dance had was something I did not expect. Eventually, I pulled out of pre-professional dance due to a number of reasons: finances, mental health, physical demand. At the time, I wasn’t sure if it was because I wasn’t good enough to keep up with the expectations my dance teacher had on me. Now, I realized it was because the dance studio couldn’t keep up with the expectations of what made dance competitions popular. I was too young though to understand.

Fast foward a decade later, I watched a reality TV show about little girls going to dance competitions. I realized the scandalous performance was them, and I watched them perform the very same dance. This show was called “Dance Moms”. I began watching more episodes, and I also began watching other dance competitions such as “Dancing with the Stars”, “World of Dance”, “So You Think You Can Dance”, etc. The pattern was clear, the media prioritized wow-factor. This wow-factor meant plugging in stunts, tricks, anything that was considered extremely dangerous in an already dangerous activity.

Then a controversial interview sparked my interest. On February 24, 2026, Timothée Chalamet made a comment claiming that “nobody cares about ballet” anymore. And thus, a project was born.

Do people really not care about ballet anymore? I doubt it at least for now, but the interest does hang on the balance for the younger generation. Something also tells me that today’s protrayal of dance on film and TV has something to do with it.

I want to discuss the implications of on-screen media has on off-screen dance and dance competitions. It’s possible I need to narrow this down to either dance as a whole or just dance competitions since there is quite a bit of context for either or.

As a reader, I want people to understand the implications of how dance is portrayed in media, and how it shapes the viewer’s perception of how dance should be off screen. There are a couple questions I hope for people to think about:

Should dance in media be considered a different style or styles than the traditional styles?
Is there a way to introduce the younger generation to traditional dance?
Would they even be interested given the decreasing attention spans as time goes on? The answer is… I don’t know, and I don’t intend on answering these questions in my project. I simply want the viewers to reflect on these questions.

However I do want to expose people in how difficult these dance comepetitions really are: financially, physically, and mentally. There is a lot of money that goes into entering a dance competition, and the return on investment isn’t always that great - especially if your studio isn’t that good.

Presentation Arc

I want to start off with a spicy hook. Timothée Chalamet’s comment would likely do the trick.

From there I would talk about the scope of my project. For this project, I really want to find data on the following:

Dance competition popularity on-screen and off-screen. So this could be on viewership on-screen versus participation growth off-screen
Financial differences. Oftentimes when you win a competition, there is a monetary prize. There are also entry fees, lodging costs, etc. Hopefully there is some data on this.
Registered dance studios and or dance competitions - would really like to know if the data can be segemented by type of styles they offer and scoring rubrics

The project will end with a call to action: appreciate all kinds of dance, and avoid putting expectations for one style onto another style. Is it appropriate for me to say “go outside and see a show”? I hope so.

It’ll likely dampen the mood. In general, I don’t want to protray this project in a positive light. If anything, the call-to-action would be on the lighter side.

Initial sketches

Full Initial sketches

Top right is seeing the number of dance competitions through the years. I think three numbers is enough to get my point. I hope to use years that were significant such as the popularity of Dance Moms, explosion of dance media content, etc.

Top left is seeing the viewership of dance competition related shows. As of now I found data for “Dancing with the Stars” and “Dance Moms”

Bottom right is comparing competition entry fees with prize money. Individual dances do not cost as much; however, adding all the dance entries up and comparing it to the prize money (which isn’t always money or of monetary value) is quite drastic. This chart will likely be the hardest to recreate since the data isn’t necessarily centralized or well documented on reliable sites.

I think it’ll be good to have more data on viewership of ballet performances. I could create multiple lines on a graph to compare!

The data

Data source(s) and how they will be used…

I’m likely going to choose a couple dance competition websites to see if they have archival data from their previous competitions. Oftentimes, they keep the scoring for a number of years before deleting them. It is also possible they keep tabs on previous regulations and pricing.

I’ll likely be taking advantage of the CMU Library database since they have a section for the arts in entertainment! There is quite a bit of data from Statista on dance popularity. Though I would need to finesse the search option since much of the data is collected outside the United States.

Links to Data

These are only some of the datasets I wish to use, but I will likely need to research more indepth and do individual case studies on studios, finances, and other factors. They may not be easily accessible, but they are public to a degree.

Researching data through website history Starpower: This is one of the largest dance competitions in the United States and perhaps globally. I would need to get a deeper dive to see there datasets if they even have any. 2026 Rules and Fees

Method and medium

I’ll be utilizing a combination of Tableau and Datawrapper to showcase my data. To present my project, I will be using Shorthand. I will be exploring ways to utilize the animation and video features to make sure the project matches the aura of dance but also in a darker tone. Maybe adding sounds would be beneficial.

I’ll likely research dance videos and images to better convey my message as well. As much as this is a data driven class, it’s hard to showcase work ethic of dancers with just numbers alone. For that I will need to research carefully to make sure I give the proper attributions to videos and to the dancers performing in the videos.

References

Once I have shuffled through more data, this portion of References will be updated. There is a lot of data, but some of it is hard to get, but I am up for the challenge! It’s also likely I won’t use the data I listed in this part… but this is only the start of my journey with this project!

AI acknowledgements

In terms of this portion of the assignment, I did not use AI. It is possible that I will be using AI to an extent since the topic I wish to research does not have a uniform data center.