By Annie Piekarczyk / STAFF

Last week, Roswell City Dance started off its new season with an intense week full of dance practices just in time to get their 80 plus dancers back into their school and dance routines.

Only two weeks into their dancing season, Roswell City Dance is already preparing for a strong season of regional and national competitions, which can be just as competitive – or even more competitive, said Shannon Childers, the director – than other highly competitive sports like basketball and football. The student dancers in the Roswell City Dance company are like many other student athletes, devoting more than 15 hours each week to perfecting their choreography and improving their technique so they can perform their best during competitions. Roswell City Dance, after all, is one of the most competitive dance companies having ended last spring’s season with the highest possible honors at all competitions attended, including the Top Studio Award at the Hall of Fame Dance Challenge in May 2009.

The dancers study and perform many different styles of dance including jazz, ballet, lyrical, contemporary, hip-hop, tap and musical theater. While some students are brand new to the company, some have been with it for years; one has even been with the company for eleven years.

As dancing has become a more popular sport recently because of shows like Fox’s “So You Think You Can Dance,” Roswell City Dance exists to facilitate quality dance education in young dancers aged 7 – 18. The dancers and faculty at Roswell City Dance are committed to the philosophy that excellence in dance is achieved through precise technical training, opportunities for performance, and an atmosphere that is conducive to personal growth and development. They believe those goals are achieved through excellent instruction designed to challenge and inspire dancers to grow both technically and individually on stage and in the classroom.

While some dancers dance for fun and pure enjoyment, Childers admits that many students are very serious about dancing and plan on becoming professional dancers; and for those dancers, the faculty at Roswell City Dance are not only there for support but also to lend expert advice and provide a foundation each dancer can use for future growth. For many years, Roswell City Dance has hosted nationally recognized choreographers for such purposes, including Travis Wall, Ivan Koumaev, Kameron Bink and Nick Watkins.

Roswell City Dance measures the success of their company not in trophies and awards but in the reaching of goals and continued evolution of dance as an art form. The company is comprised of a select group of dancers, who were each particularly chosen to represent the company after a series of auditions. The company is an intensive, competition oriented company and each dancer is required to take intensive technique classes and a majority of their performances are competition related.

Their annual Winter Concert will show the weekend of February 5 at the Roswell Cultural Arts Center, and the company will also travel to three regional competitions and conclude their season by competing in a national competition in summer 2010.