The Crown International DanceSport Championship held in Melbourne's Crown Palladium Ballroom in April is always a huge event as it combines ballroom, theatrical and a Pro-Am event over two spaces on two days.
Our Master's competitors did us proud, all making the finals and winning and placing throughout these events.
Well done to:
- Oryst and Janet Tkacz
- John Henderson and Giselle West
- Qunyi Sun and Yinghong Liu
- Neil and Sonja Ackland
It was wonderful to see Filipino couple, Jam and Kevin, who now live in South Australia, making the final of the Adult Open Latin final and placing sixth.
The highlight of the first day of competition was Sigurdur and Annalisa winning the Professional Latin final.
The improvement that they continue to achieve through working with their overseas coaches was evident as this couple wowed the audience in this high level international field.
Pro-Am and Coach/Student events
The Pro-Am and Coach/Student event on day two is a unique event in the DanceSport calendar. It assesses all of the competitors individually and provides them with a total score out of 100 for each event they enter.
The benefit here is that no matter what level dancer you are you can still see on an individual level how you perform and, more specifically, if you return, to see how you have improved over that time.
The competition is also less stressful as there are fewer couples on the floor so students can better showcase their performances.
The structure of the competition allows different grades to be mixed in together. It is, therefore, unlikely that you would be directly competing against other couples on the floor at the same time as you.
That allows students to better go out onto the floor and do their thing.
Strong South Australian turnout
This year there was a large contingent of South Australians with 11 students competing.
The top performer out of all the entrants was clearly Torehn Lobow with Annalisa Zoanetti.
Torehn achieved above 90% in all six of his Latin events and in so doing won all six categories - an amazing performance.
New competitors
Just as exciting was watching five new dancers compete in their first interstate completions, including Sarah Quinn with Clint Fiedler.
Sarah only started dancing three months before the event and performed exceptionally well, proving there is no excuse for anyone not to get out there and give it a try!
Congratulations also to a group of our social dancers who took the plunge into competition:
- Jacqui Krahnert
- Tam Thi Pham
- Christine Young
- Angela Tseng
All these ladies looked beautiful, danced impressively and thoroughly enjoyed themselves on the floor.
Well done to the professionals and teachers for their work on the day:
- Annalisa Zoanetti with three students
- Sigurdur Sigurdsson with two students
- Rhett English with three students
- Clint Fiedler with three students
They were all made to work hard by continuously going on and off the floor with each of their different students.
