Middle School Dance Team Audition Prep: The 3-Week Plan

Everything in this plan builds toward the moment the music starts and the judges look up: clean, on the counts, and easy to see.

Duration: 12 min · Equipment: A kitchen counter or chair back, socks or bare feet, a non-slip floor

Stand sideways to the counter with one hand resting on it. Eight pliés in first position, eight in second, heels glued to the floor on the way down and knees tracking over the toes. Then sixteen tendus to the front, side, and back from each foot, pressing through the ball of the foot until only the toes touch. Finish with sixteen slow relevés, holding the top for two counts and lowering on four. Do this every day of the plan before anything else. Nothing that follows happens on cold legs.

Only after the barre work, when the legs feel warm. Lunge with the back knee down, thirty seconds each side. Hamstring fold with a flat back, thirty seconds each. Figure-four on the floor, thirty seconds each. Straddle, sitting tall first, then walking the hands forward. Splits last, only as far as they go today, with hands on the floor for support. No bouncing, no partner pushing, no sitting in a split while watching a show. Warm and honest beats far and hurt.

Hands on hips, standing leg straight, supporting heel pressing into the floor. Eight front kicks each leg, toe pointed, kicking from the hip and not the knee, landing the foot softly in the spot it left. Then eight without the hand support. The height is whatever height keeps the standing leg straight and the chest up. A lower kick with a straight standing leg reads cleaner than a high kick that folds the body.

Duration: 10 min · Equipment: A sticky note on the wall at eye level, a smooth floor in socks or dance shoes (never a rug, never a slick tile)

Stand facing the sticky note. Sixteen slow quarter-turns in relevé on two feet, eyes leaving the note last and finding it first. Then eight single pirouettes from fourth position, arms in first, passé foot glued to the knee, spotting the note. Land in a clean fourth with the heel down. If the floor grabs, stop and find a better floor. If the head stops spotting, the turn stops being a turn.

Start with sautés, small jumps in first position: sixteen with the heels landing fully, knees bending on every landing, no sound. Then chassé into a small split leap across the room, landing on a bent front knee with the back foot arriving after, quiet. Five at ankle height, then five slightly bigger only if the landings stayed quiet. Height comes last and only after the landing is right. Anything acrobatic, walkovers, aerials, tumbling, stays in the studio with a coach and a mat. Not at home, not in a hallway.

Find an eight-count from any dance tutorial video in the style of the audition. Set the timer for four minutes and learn only that eight-count, counting out loud. When the timer goes, turn your back to the mirror and perform it to the music three times, full out, without looking. Then learn the next eight-count in four minutes and run both together. This is the audition: someone shows it twice, you have it or you do not, and then they call your group. The more times a dancer practices being handed choreography and running it away from the mirror, the less the room scares them.

Take the two eight-counts from last week. Run them looking at a spot on the wall above where the judges would sit, not at the floor and not at the mirror. Then run them with a real face: eyebrows up, a genuine smile or an open mouth, eyes bright, matching the song. Then run them big, arms fully stretched, every position finished. Record one run on the phone and watch it once. The question is simple: could someone across a gym tell what you were feeling?

Four full-out runs of the whole combination with thirty seconds between them. Audition groups run the piece two or three times back to back, and the last run is where faces drop and kicks get low. The goal is for run four to look like run one. Drink water between rounds, and take one full day of no dancing before the audition. Sleep is part of the plan, not a break from it.

Set a chair at the front of the room. Walk in, pick the spot with the clearest line to the chair, plant your feet, and hold a strong neutral stance for ten seconds before the music starts. Then run the combination once. Practice walking to the front, not the back, because on audition day the dancers who hide in the back row are hard to score. The judges cannot reward what they cannot see.

Run the plan, then after the audition, tell us which part of the combination came fastest and what the judges said about kicks or turns. That is where the next plan starts.