The 21st Prince Albert Festival of Dance took over the EA Rawlinson this past weekend.
The annual festival drew more than 730 dancers from around the province to Prince Albert. The event began Wednesday evening and ran until Sunday.
Erin Hall, a member of the festival board of directors, said that this year’s event wraps up the competitive season in Prince Albert.
“For most of these dancers, it’s their last shot on stage,” Hall said. “Then they’ll have a recital, of course, with their individual studios.”
She said the Prince Albert Festival of Dance is not always the festival finale as it depends on how the dates align each year.
“It is nice though when we are at the end because you grow through that competition season as a dancer,” she explained. “You start out at your first competition and things are a little rough, but by the time you get to your last, it’s pretty amazing.
“It’s really special, especially for the PA people,” she added. “The organization is run as a non-profit with community sponsorship. This year the organization surpassed $350,000 total in sponsorships and awards in 21 years.”
There were 735 dancers including 275 from Prince Albert from four local studios.
Hall said there were 11 studios total in attendance. These included A-List Dance and Acrobatics from Humboldt, En Pointe Dance Studio from Monmarte, Hanley School of Dance, Melfort Dance Centre, Step it Up Dance from Clavet, Studio 747 from Shellbrook and Waldheim School of Dance. The four local studios were Xcelerate Dance Academy, BOLD Dance Productions, Prince Albert Dance Company and Ballet ‘n All That Jazz.
Hall said this year’s festival had good representation from around the province.
Melfort Dance Centre performed “Faith” a tap large group dance during a Saturday afternoon session at the 21st annual Prince Albert Festival of Dance at the EA Rawlinson Centre.
She said that studios have brought as few as seven total dancers to as many as 136.
Hall said that the dance festival has a competition structure, but the main goal is to build the dance community and encourage a positive environment.
“Competitive dance has to happen. There’s no way to translate out of that. You have to have this competitive sort of structure. But some of them (festivals) really, they’re money making and they’re trying to draw people to make more money and they’re making the competition really fancy with supernova awards and all these over the top sort of things. We have gold with distinction, gold, silver, bronze. That’s the way we do things,” Hall said.
“One of the things I also really like we do is we only post the top three marks. If there’s 15 people that dance in that category and if somebody got a really low mark, the world doesn’t have to know about it.”
Hall said the structure is good for motivation.
“It’s more that you should be competing against yourself the last time you were on stage. You just want to be a better dancer than you were yesterday kind of thing.
Parents contribute a combined 352 hours of volunteer time during the five-day festival. This is on top of the year-long preparations from the Board of Directors.
“It’s a massive, massive commitment,” Hall said. “We’re here from seven in the morning and we don’t leave until 10:30 at night. We’re lucky that we all get 4 hours of sleep at night and then come back and just try our best to run a public event like this. There’s just so much. It’s very overwhelming but it’s so rewarding.”
Hall said said a festival of this size brings many people to the community.
She said along with the 500 dancers there are also family members who also come out for the Prince Albert festival. She said the Festival is hard to grow because physically and spatially the numbers could be overwhelming. She said that adding additional days would require even more volunteer commitment.
“We just completely leave our lives to run into shambles while we pull this off. We’re very proud of it in the end but still, it’s very hard,” Hall said. “It’s very challenging.
“It’s about community. It’s really just bringing us together and having a good, positive experience for everybody if we can.”
michael.oleksyn@paherald.sk.ca
