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| Image of eye, mascara wand, and fingers - Pixfav - CC BY-ND 2.0 |
I love the precision of dance and movement. It hates my ever-aging, whinging body.
Ballroom dancing loves dressing up, doing hair and makeup. I hate the fussing over something I feel is only a small part of the sport.
A small part, but, unfortunately for me, a large and important part of ones' competitive self-image.
Enter the internet and social media.
Ballroom dancing has always had a certain type of culture and self-image stuck to it, think Strictly Ballroom, and with the advent of social media on the internet not much has changed.
What has changed is the amount of content available. Instagram and Pinterest, for example, make it easy to follow your favourite internationally famous competitors and share costume ideas with others. In a sport where self-image and good grooming is not only encouraged but essential, it's not surprising that self-image is the main focus of any social post online, even if at face value it's supposed to look like someone training hard.
Take this post on ballroomdancetube for example - at first glance, it's just a guy dancing at the beach. Look again, and you'll notice that while he could be wearing a shirt, he's not. He could also be wearing baggy swim shorts. He's not.
These sorts of posts are examples of the insta-influencers of the international ballroom world.
Let's take a look at Oxana Lebedew's Instagram account as an example.
You'll note that while there are many practice and performance videos, plenty of influencer posts exist also. In this one, Oxana promotes her dressmaker, who probably provides her with discounts or a free dress occasionally in turn for her promotion and ongoing use of his business.
I'll save you the clicking around - there are no prices listed on the dressmaker's site. This means they're not 500 bucks ex-China. Just sayin'.
Oxana is a microcelebrity of her world.
Others like her, before the Internet, were also microcelebrities - sharing their self-image via dance magazines around the world. Magazines are still out there, but shifting online and hopefully re-connecting themselves with the new social media influencing world.
This influencer world is just a small part of the way in which successful ballroom dancers use the Internet to promote and influence their sport.
Interested in reading more about influencers and self-image online?
Start here:
Charles Wagner, Ester Aguirre, Erin M. Sumner
Linh Nguyen, Kim Barbour
updated 22/10/19 - minor word editing and paragraph changes
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