Deborah Telford
Friday 13 November, 2009
Ask talented 17-year-old Diocesan School student Stephanie Waterman what’s best about being one Auckland’s highest ranking competitive ballroom dancers for her age and she’ll say wearing gorgeous, glittering outfits worth up to $5000 each.
The worst thing? Having to grin and bear the blisters she gets all over her feet when she performs up to 120 dances with her partner Lucas McWilliam in gruelling two-day competitions where competitors are sometimes on their feet for more than 30 hours over two days.
You get new shoes for nationals. Once you put them on you don’t dare take them off until all your dances are over because it would be too painful to try to get them back on again,” says Stephanie, who entered her first dancing competition at the age of four.
Stephanie and 17-year-old Lucas, who goes to Northcote College, have been dancing ballroom and Latin routines together in age-based grades for the last five years. Their dances include the waltz, slow foxtrot, tango, quickstep, Viennese waltz, cha cha, rumba, samba paso doble and jive.
Their performances have been judged so well that they have rapidly progressed to adult grades which range from A to E.
At the recent New Zealand Amateur and professional Dancesport Championships at Auckland’s ASB Stadium, the duo won the Adult C grade ballroom event ahead of many older and more experienced dancers including several overseas competitors in what is a highly competitive international sport.
Their win means they will now compete nationally in the top two competition grades, A and B, and that they are among New Zealand’s most accomplished ballroom dancers for their young ages.
In the Auckland Area Competition held in August Stephanie and Lucas also won three first places for their dances in the youth open sections, four second places in adult B, C and D grades and a third place in an adult open grade.
Their dance partnership appears to be a perfect match, but Stephanie says it almost didn’t happen.
Before we started dancing together, Lucas was a very strong Irish dancer but he wasn’t interested at all in doing ballroom dancing. So when we were meant to get together for our first trial together, he decided not to show up.
The two friends now practise together four to five times a week for one and a half to two hours at time. They both plan to study at Auckland University next year but will also keep dancing together and hope to compete in China.
Our goal is to be at B and C grad level in all of our styles.
Stephanie, who loves drama and is studying it along with debating, Spanish, accounting, maths and history at Diocesan, has also applied to study at the National Institute of Dramatic Arts in Sydney.