Oxford Competition Dance dazzles in first place

Going into Loughborough, OUCD’s Varsity loss on 21^st February still stung fresh. Losing to Cambridge had been a difficult result for the team, particularly after our win the previous year. Despite an unusually warm and welcoming atmosphere from Cambridge (it’s always friendly, but often on Varsity day tinged with a subtle frost), the team left feeling deflated. 

With a national competition ahead of us, however, there was little time to dwell on our sorrows. Falling between Varsity and Loughborough, our annual showcase allowed us time to refine our pieces and, most importantly, rediscover our love for performance, growing closer than ever as a team.

Two weeks can make a world of difference. With the Loughborough University Dance Competition taking place from 7^th to 8^th March, this short window of time required the team to learn quickly from our loss, coming back stronger than ever.

Loughborough is the closest thing competition dance has to BUCS: with 29 universities, over 1,400 dancers, and a full weekend of competition across multiple styles, coming out with a win is the victory of all victories. Less about a single rivalry, the day determines national standing.

This year, for the second time in three years, OUCD reigned victorious. A well-earned first place in this national competition almost healed the wounds we had nursed after our Varsity defeat only two weeks before. Adding to our success, OUCD were awarded Overall Best University, alongside two other headline titles: Best Dancer, won by Josh Redfern, and Best Choreography for Advanced Contemporary, choreographed by Christie Sardjono. To come away with all three awards is something the competition has never seen before.

Beyond that, the results were consistently strong across the board. OUCD placed second in the Commercial category (choreographed by Grace Hillier), and third in both Contemporary (choreographed by Christie Sardjono) and Wildcard (choreographed by Alex Somers). A consistently strong performance across a diversity of styles is one of OUCD’s key strengths.

This breadth is typical of OUCD. As a team, we train across a range of styles, including ballet, jazz, contemporary, commercial, and hip hop. Not everyone does everything, but the overlap between dancers means each piece is built from a slightly different combination of strengths.

The choreography award for Advanced Contemporary reflected a painstaking process that began months earlier. Pieces are developed gradually, through rehearsals that involve a lot of reworking, refining, and, if we’re lucky, Christie exclaiming: “Holy sh*t, that looks really good!” Like any piece of artwork, by the time we present them, they’ve usually changed quite significantly from where they began.

Dance occupies a slightly ambiguous position within Oxford sport. We train at Iffley, deal with injuries, and go through Sports Federation processes like any other club. At the same time, competition is partly subjective: performance, storytelling, artistry, and movement quality matter just as much as technique. That can make results harder to predict, but also makes outcomes like this particularly significant.

For President Ruby Suss-Francksen and the team, the result was a strong way to round off the competition season. Coming so soon after Varsity, it also offered a different perspective on how the year has gone overall, complementing other recent milestones – most notably securing our first ever Extraordinary Full Blue for Lucy Williams after her ‘Best Dancer’ award at the same competition last year, and increasing our provision of half blue awards. While Varsity remains an important marker, Loughborough is a broader one. To finish first there, and to do so ahead of Cambridge, among others, was a reminder of what the team is capable of on a national stage.

With the competition season now over, OUCD will turn to Trinity Term performances, showcasing our national standard choreography at Brasenose Ball and Magdalen Ball. That said, Loughborough stands out not only as a peak in OUCD’s competitive year but in its entire competitive history.