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Transcript

Meet the Hosts of Making The Impact! · Making The Impact - A Dance Competition Podcast

• 0:07
  SPEAKER_00: Have you ever wondered what goes on behind the table at a dance competition?
• 0:10
  SPEAKER_00: Exactly what are the judges looking for anyway?
• 0:13
  SPEAKER_00: This is Making the Impact, a dance competition podcast.
• 0:16
  SPEAKER_00: Each week, we'll cover a different topic related to the world of competitive dance from the perspective of the judges behind the table.
• 0:24
  SPEAKER_01: Hi everyone, I'm Courtney Ortiz.
• 0:26
  SPEAKER_01: I'm the owner of Impact Dance Adjudicators, the first and only service in the industry to provide pre-screen judges to dance competitions.
• 0:33
  SPEAKER_01: And I'll be your host at Making the Impact.
• 0:36
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm Leslie Miller, friend, colleague, and fellow dance competition judge.
• 0:40
  SPEAKER_00: I also serve as the editor-in-chief of IDA's blog, and I'll be producing and co-hosting along with Courtney.
• 0:46
  SPEAKER_00: We wanted to take some time to introduce ourselves and let you know what to expect from the podcast.
• 0:51
  SPEAKER_01: So a little bit about myself and my background.
• 0:54
  SPEAKER_01: I grew up in Baltimore, Maryland, and I was a competitive dancer my entire life, up until I was about 16 years old.
• 1:02
  SPEAKER_01: Then I went to college once I graduated high school and did my first professional job on Royal Caribbean Cruise Lines, which is where I met Leslie.
• 1:10
  SPEAKER_01: How exciting! And we stayed super close friends, obviously, since then.
• 1:14
  SPEAKER_01: After that, I moved straight to New York City and began auditioning.
• 1:18
  SPEAKER_01: I've done a lot of fun things in my career.
• 1:20
  SPEAKER_01: Some of my favorite credits include the West Side Story International Tour, where I got to travel all through Europe and had a 10-week sit-down in Paris.
• 1:29
  SPEAKER_01: It was a dream come true.
• 1:31
  SPEAKER_01: I've also performed with the Radio City Roquette in the Radio City Christmas Spectacular in Nashville.
• 1:37
  SPEAKER_01: I've danced on the Today Show with Cy and Chris Brown.
• 1:41
  SPEAKER_01: And I also performed in the first national tour of Finding Neverland.
• 1:46
  SPEAKER_01: Some of my super favorite credits include my dream show in the Heights that I performed at PCLO in Pittsburgh.
• 1:54
  SPEAKER_01: I also was in the first ever revival of Jerome Robbins Broadway, which premiered at the Muni in St.
• 2:00
  SPEAKER_01: Louis and Theater Under the Stars.
• 2:03
  SPEAKER_01: Most recently, I was on FX hit series Fossey Verdon, and I played the dance double for young Bob Fossey.
• 2:11
  SPEAKER_01: I am a current competition judge and on faculty with Revel Dance Convention as their Broadway jazz teacher.
• 2:18
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm the owner of Impact Dance Adjudicators.
• 2:21
  SPEAKER_00: A little bit about my background.
• 2:28
  SPEAKER_00: I studied all kinds of dance and throughout all of that experience decided I wanted to major in dance.
• 2:34
  SPEAKER_00: I was lucky to be accepted at Oklahoma City University, where I was a dance performance major and took many classes in pedagogy, kinesiology, voice, ballet tap, jazz, you name it.
• 2:45
  SPEAKER_00: I worked for two contracts on Royal Caribbean, the first of which I met Courtney Ortiz.
• 2:51
  SPEAKER_00: After that, moved to New York City, started auditioning, had a really wonderful professional career for about 10 years, which included starting to judge for many competitions nationally and internationally.
• 3:02
  SPEAKER_00: Some of my favorite credits include the National Tour of the Music Man, where I was the understudy for a 10-year-old girl as an adult, so that was fun.
• 3:10
  SPEAKER_00: I often work for Sesame Workshop and am very good friends with Elmo and Abby Kadabi.
• 3:16
  SPEAKER_00: I love to work for Flash Mob America and surprise people.
• 3:19
  SPEAKER_00: I've had the pleasure of being on faculty at several studios in the tri-state area, and I continue to travel and teach internationally for conventions and workshops and to set choreography.
• 3:28
  SPEAKER_00: I've also had the opportunity to choreograph several national opening number routines for competitions around the country.
• 3:35
  SPEAKER_00: The most recent change for me in my professional career, after 10 years of performing around the world professionally, I have shifted into the corporate division of Capizio, where I work in product testing.
• 3:47
  SPEAKER_00: I'm also currently the director for Spirit of Dance Awards Dance Competitions, so come out and see me this season.
• 3:53
  SPEAKER_00: In addition to judging for IDA and several other competitions around the country.
• 3:59
  SPEAKER_00: So, Courtney, I know a lot of our listeners may already know what Impact Dance Adjudicators is, but for our new listeners, hi, thanks for being here.
• 4:07
  SPEAKER_00: Can you explain what IDA is, how you came up with the idea for it, and what you hope to achieve with the company?
• 4:13
  SPEAKER_01: Sure.
• 4:13
  SPEAKER_01: So my goal with creating IDA has always been to provide competitions with a convenient and reliable way to find qualified judges, as well as provide talented judges in the industry more working opportunities.
• 4:26
  SPEAKER_01: I came up with the idea to start IDA while I was judging lots and lots of dance competitions across the East Coast.
• 4:34
  SPEAKER_01: And many of the competition directors were coming to me and asking for referrals or if I knew any friends that would be a good fit at judging.
• 4:41
  SPEAKER_01: Maybe one of their judges backed out or somebody booked a job and could no longer do an event.
• 4:46
  SPEAKER_01: And they would always come to me.
• 4:48
  SPEAKER_01: And I would always be able to find them awesome judges to fill those panels.
• 4:54
  SPEAKER_01: But I started thinking, why isn't there a better way for competition owners to find qualified judges?
• 5:00
  SPEAKER_01: They were mainly just referrals from my friends at first before I started IDA.
• 5:05
  SPEAKER_01: So I wanted to create a way for competition owners to know that the judges that they were receiving through IDA are screened and vetted and have experience in the classroom and are strong dance educators, but also have fabulous critiques while they're on the job.
• 5:21
  SPEAKER_01: So that's when a light bulb moment hit for me.
• 5:24
  SPEAKER_01: And I said, why don't I create this service?
• 5:26
  SPEAKER_01: So back in 2014 is when IDA launched.
• 5:30
  SPEAKER_01: We are heading into our sixth season.
• 5:33
  SPEAKER_01: We have about 125 judges on the roster, and we are continuing to grow every single year.
• 5:39
  SPEAKER_01: We have judges located in all regions across the United States, and this year we're expanding into Canada, which we're super excited about.
• 5:46
  SPEAKER_01: And we have lots of talented judges from Radio City Roquettes to Broadway performers to commercial dancers in Los Angeles and concert dancers.
• 5:56
  SPEAKER_01: And we are currently hard at work staffing judges for upcoming panels and the 2020 events with all of our affiliated competitions.
• 6:04
  SPEAKER_01: So we can't wait for competition season to start.
• 6:07
  SPEAKER_01: We do a lot of things at IDA besides just staffing judges for competitions.
• 6:11
  SPEAKER_01: We host an online trading course for all of our judges to prep for the season.
• 6:15
  SPEAKER_01: We do online judges' critiques where you can send us your video and we will critique it prior to you hitting the stage.
• 6:21
  SPEAKER_01: And we also offer a judges blog on our website that is super popular.
• 6:25
  SPEAKER_01: Leslie is a current editor and one of our writers on the blog.
• 6:28
  SPEAKER_00: Yay! So check out our blog if you haven't already.
• 6:31
  SPEAKER_00: It's at Impact Dance Adjudicatorslash Judges blog.
• 6:35
  SPEAKER_00: We were just trying to brainstorm some ways to build the company and give back a little bit more in different ways.
• 6:41
  SPEAKER_00: So Courtney approached me about the blog a couple years ago.
• 6:44
  SPEAKER_00: If my life path hadn't taken me into majoring in dance, my plan was to major in English and be a journalist.
• 6:51
  SPEAKER_00: So I've always loved writing.
• 6:52
  SPEAKER_00: I've always thought I've been good at it.
• 6:54
  SPEAKER_00: So when we came up with the blog idea, I was really pumped.
• 6:57
  SPEAKER_00: We wanted to give people an idea of what it's like to be a judge and what we actually look for as judges, because sometimes it feels like a big mystery to teachers and studio owners as well as dancers as to what we want.
• 7:09
  SPEAKER_00: Spoiler alert, we want what you want for your students to learn how to dance well, be employable if that's the path they want to go down, to learn discipline and how to lose gracefully and how to move through the world with style.
• 7:21
  SPEAKER_00: So our blog gives the judges an opportunity to go more in depth with ideas they might not be able to get across in a three-minute critique.
• 7:27
  SPEAKER_00: This past year we brought on another IDA judge, Maddie Kurtz, to be the writer and compile each blog while I get the final edits to pull it all together.
• 7:35
  SPEAKER_00: So, Maddie, thank you so much.
• 7:36
  SPEAKER_00: She's been such an amazing addition to our team.
• 7:39
  SPEAKER_01: Shout out to Maddie.
• 7:40
  SPEAKER_01: She's the best.
• 7:41
  SPEAKER_01: Maddie also serves as one of our administrative assistants on IDA.
• 7:45
  SPEAKER_01: And then she writes amazing blog articles.
• 7:48
  SPEAKER_01: This year with our Judges blog, we are actually letting the judges hit the blog.
• 7:53
  SPEAKER_01: They will be writing all of the articles themselves.
• 7:55
  SPEAKER_01: And then Maddie and Leslie will be editing them before they get published.
• 7:59
  SPEAKER_01: So really exciting stuff.
• 8:01
  SPEAKER_01: Lots of fun articles coming your way on the IDA Judges blog.
• 8:05
  SPEAKER_00: So, Courtney, since we have, you know, you do a million things with this company.
• 8:09
  SPEAKER_00: You not only do you did you start it, you're the main person in charge of everything, but you're still working and auditioning and teaching and judging yourself.
• 8:17
  SPEAKER_00: So why a podcast?
• 8:19
  SPEAKER_00: Why are we doing another why are you putting another thing on your plate?
• 8:22
  SPEAKER_01: Why a podcast?
• 8:24
  SPEAKER_01: Why not?
• 8:25
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, podcasts are so cool.
• 8:27
  SPEAKER_01: They're so much fun to listen to.
• 8:29
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, everybody loves a podcast right now.
• 8:31
  SPEAKER_01: They're so in.
• 8:32
  SPEAKER_01: And I kind of thought, let's just do it.
• 8:35
  SPEAKER_01: Let's take this opportunity to enjoy even more hot topics in the competition industry because, of course, there are so many to talk about and bring more knowledge from so many different dance educators that we have on our roster to discuss these topics in fuller detail.
• 8:53
  SPEAKER_01: So we are going to be doing a lot of roundtable discussions with judges on specific topics where we can all discuss them even further than what we have done previously in our blog.
• 9:04
  SPEAKER_01: And we're planning to do interviews with competition owners, which we're very excited about, and just open up the opportunities for dance teachers and dance educators to learn even more and get an inside look as to what the judges are actually thinking from our side of the table.
• 9:22
  SPEAKER_01: So we have a lot of awesome topics coming your way on the podcast, including tips and tricks for competition cleaning, because we are all in the cleaning mode right now at the studio.
• 9:32
  SPEAKER_01: Lyrical versus contemporary, which is always a hot topic.
• 9:35
  SPEAKER_01: We are going to discuss that inside and out and give you the rundown on what really makes lyrical different and what really makes contemporary different.
• 9:44
  SPEAKER_01: We're going to talk about choreography at competition, age ranges and level expectations, boys and dance, technique, tap, hip-hop, jazz, you name it.
• 9:53
  SPEAKER_01: We will be talking about it on the podcast.
• 9:56
  SPEAKER_00: If you have any questions, we are opening up the forum to ask us a question.
• 10:00
  SPEAKER_00: Anything you've ever wanted to ask a judge, now is your chance.
• 10:03
  SPEAKER_00: Send us your questions directly to our website to be featured in an upcoming episode of our podcast.
• 10:08
  SPEAKER_01: You can send any type of question you want.
• 10:10
  SPEAKER_01: I'm here to answer them all.
• 10:13
  SPEAKER_01: So please send away.
• 10:14
  SPEAKER_01: They can be about technique, performance, choreography, levels, the competition experience, the judging experience, even advice questions for your career or transitioning into being a professional dancer.
• 10:28
  SPEAKER_01: Honestly, any question that you have that you want answered by me, send them to our website now.
• 10:35
  SPEAKER_00: What it really comes down to why we're here with this podcast is that we care about dancers.
• 10:40
  SPEAKER_00: We were dancers, we continue to be dancers, and IDA judges just want dancers to succeed and to do well and enjoy themselves on stage.
• 10:50
  SPEAKER_00: We have so much to offer, and we're really excited to bring everything to you via this podcast.
• 10:59
  SPEAKER_00: We are so excited for you to tune in to Making the Impact, a dance competition podcast.
• 11:04
  SPEAKER_00: Look out for a new episode coming your way every Monday throughout the dance season.
• 11:07
  SPEAKER_00: You can find us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, Google Podcasts, and even tune in on our website.
• 11:15
  SPEAKER_01: If you like what you hear, feel free to spread the word on social media and subscribe.
• 11:19
  SPEAKER_01: Don't forget to write us a review on Apple Podcasts.
• 11:22
  SPEAKER_01: We can't wait to hear what you think.
• 11:24
  SPEAKER_01: This is Making the Impact a Dance Competition Podcast.
• 11:28
  SPEAKER_01: Till next time, keep dancing.