Ballroom dancers coming to BYU

The ballroom dance world will have its eyes on Provo this week when the United States National Amateur DanceSport Championships head to Brigham Young University.

Preteen, junior, youth and adult ballroom competitors and their families and friends will fill the Marriott Center arena for the event Thursday, Friday and Saturday.

Organizer Linda Wakefield said the competition has grown exponentially in the past few years.

"When we first started hosting the competitions, in 1993, we had to move from the Wilkinson Center to the Marriott Center," said Wakefield, who co-directs the BYU Ballroom Dance Company with her husband Lee. "And for 10 years we were able to host the U.S. Professional Standard Competition."

These days, BYU hosts two competitions a year — the National Amateur DanceSport in March and the BYU DanceSport Championships in November.

"Last year, we hosted 56 formation teams, which are comprised of eight couples during the amateur competition," Wakefield said. This year the same number is expected.

The competitions will be broken into six sessions spanning three days. See www.byunationals.com for full schedule.

Organizing and hosting an event such as the Amateur DanceSport Championships comes with an array of challenges, but Wakefield has found that the main headache is costume restrictions.

BYU has a strict dress code that pertains to students as well as guest dancers and competitors.

"We announce it and post it in all of our correspondence, but there are times when people forget," Wakefield said. "We haven't had a lot of problems, because the dancers want to compete here. They know how renowned the ballroom program is here and they want to come and dance.

"The funny thing is that even our own Utah resident competitors have had to adjust their costumes to fit the restrictions. And rarely do we have any major uproar about the costumes from the dancers and the audience."

Wakefield's love for dance emerged when she took part in a cotillion as a young girl in Tennessee.

"It was a social event, like cotillions are," she said. "But I liked the ballroom dancing. It started a hunger for more that guided me throughout my career."

In college, she was "obsessed" with ballroom dance, even transferring to BYU just to study the art and sport.