Documentary Mad Hot Ballroom 2: Competition has to hurt

2020 Note: This is turning out to be my most read entry. Would love to hear your thoughts on it. If you like, leave a message or email me! samson_wong@yahoo.com

Note: Last week I talked about this film that documented the Dancing Classroom programme in New York. It is a 10 week dance programme for grade 5 students that closes with an interschool competition. The programme is adopted by around 200 schools and serves over 15,000 kids (my estimate).

Competition to draw participation

Competition has always been an effective way to draw participation. But discussion on participation has mostly been focused on non-competitiveness to avoid rivalry and to find more creative ways of drawing participation. Yet the success of this competition warrants us to consider if competition can be more good than bad?

First, several notes about competition:

• For it to work, the competition has to matter. The effort and consequences must feel real. It must feel good for some and bad for others.
• There has to be guidelines to win, or else it is more of a gamble than a competition.
• The win has to be clear. Winning and losing should be intuitive rather than understood.
• By definition and in the simplest terms, there are winners and there are losers. (But I just can’t bring myself to use the term losers)

The competition in the film

The documentary captured one losing team, showing their immediate reactions, their teachers’ encouragements and the students themselves reflecting as a group on the loss and the experience in general.

The children were first in shock when they realized they were not going to the semifinals, then most of them cried. The in-depth interviews earlier in the documentary have helped us the viewers to connect with many of the kids that I felt a bit of the loss.

The teacher was also in tears as she consoled the children in a tight circle while other teams wept or celebrated.

Some days later, back in school, the students had an opportunity to talk about the experience.

The students talked about other teams, about their own performance, sometimes showing frustrations that the judges thought that certain team was better than them.

Consoling children that loss

“Everybody should be glad that they even went. Right?” From a fellow student who did not dance but assisted his teammates. One dancer in reply, “Yeah, but we did everything they told us to.” The children thought that following such guidelines would ensure them a win.

The teacher said, “All along I tried explaining it to you it wasn’t about the competition. It was just about learning the ballroom dancing”.

Competitions draw emotional investment that drives people to work harder to win. As a result of the emotional investment, losses hurt. So to lessen the hurt, one could blame the system or those who operate the systems. The children are still working out their emotions and are unable to perceive their teacher’s words.

Learning from the competition

“And remember, whatever you got form this program, this is for the rest of your life”. Dance teacher.

The dance teacher’s consoling words to the above team was telling. He probably meant the commitment, hard work, friendship, losing and etc. that surfaced during the rehearsals. Yet I, the viewer, wonder if the children have also gotten something else:

• Dance is about winning
• Competition is a big part of how life is decided

As mentioned above, recent developments in participatory arts strive towards non-competitiveness. It is both to avoid rivalry and to be more creative in drawing participation. Competition works by using extrinsic motivations such as reward and fame to draw participation. According to the psychologies, extrinsic motivations are ineffective long term motivator because they make things less enjoyable and less satisfying. The strive towards non-competitiveness is to switch from extrinsic to intrinsic motivators, drawing participation by letting people experience the intrinsic satisfaction of the act itself.

Extrinsic motivations are simple and easy to understand. It also requires something standardized so that its attainment is easily identifiable and compared. Problems arise when standardization occurs in the arts:

• Artistic quality is simplified and formularized
• Satisfaction is reduced

It is so common to hear “I hate practicing”. The child does not hate playing piano, they only hate practicing. Though the action is exactly the same, there is a fundamental difference if a child feels they are playing or practicing. This is not black and white, there is certainly satisfaction in working towards perfection and being able to master a piece, but the motivation should not just be about attaining the next grade.

This is the reason why the community arts and socially-engaged arts have avoided competitions. Competitions easily snuff creativity and eventually motivation. Competitions where winning and losing matter little are ineffective in drawing participation.

Stepping back from the arts, I, like many others, long for a world that is less competitive. There are better ways of recognizing a wider range of quality than a competition. If life is a series of competition, then living merely becomes a means to gain something else; life becomes tasteless.

“And remember, whatever you got form this program, this is for the rest of your life”. Dance teacher.

The look of shock and lost on the face of those who loss spoke volumes. Is what awaits these children in the real world simply more and tougher competitions? Some may believe that it is better to prepare children to win, to face loses. But I believe in bringing about a society where competition is only one among numerous ways of drawing out energy and creativity. And to begin that, we as community artists must demonstrate that there are other ways of bringing people together aside from competition.