Sports and Arts: Maybe not so Different?
by Savannah Cress
As the parent of two girls who are involved in dance, I’ve occasionally found myself in situations over the years comparing arts and athletics. With my oldest daughter, an early-elementary school spirit week containing a “sports day” set off an all-out anxiety attack over what to wear. A kid at school had told her that dance was not a sport and she didn’t have any other athletic pursuits. You’d have thought the world was ending. At the time, I attempted to assure her dance absolutely was a sport, as well as an art form, and encouraged her to wear whatever she wanted to wear. She ended up wearing a random, insignificant baseball cap and avoiding the “defend dance as a sport” situation altogether. Admittedly, the part of me that wishes my girls the strength to have confidence in whatever they want to do, and an attitude of to hell with anybody who tries to convince them otherwise, died a bit that morning.
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Being research-inclined by nature, the aforementioned tragedy prompted me to look into the technical definition of the arts vs. that of sports. The Oxford Dictionary defines a sport as “an activity involving physical exertion and skill in which an individual or team competes against another or others for entertainment.” [1] According to Webster, art is “skill acquired by experience, study, or observation” and “the conscious use of skill and creative imagination.” [2] The phrase “performing arts” is simply defined as “types of art that are performed for an audience.” [3] [7]
Keeping these definitions in mind, if one was to create a Venn diagram (and who doesn’t love a good Venn diagram..), there would be a lot of overlapping attributes. In fact, focusing on sports and specifically performing arts, with a quick glance, the only differentiating words in there may appear to be “competes,” and “creative imagination.” The remainder of the definitions can easily apply to both categories. Performing arts and sports each contain a physical element. Both art and sports require skills developed through studying, practicing, learning from past attempts, and observing.
Many people automatically associate sports with competitiveness. When it comes to sports teams, fans are often every bit as competitive as the participants, sometimes even more so. And nobody in their right mind runs a race thinking the optimal outcome is to finish last. Though included solely in the definition of sport, the act of competing can be applied to the arts as well. The competitive side of art includes competitions in visual art, poetry, music and dance, along with the ever-competitive world of theater. While not often thought of as competitive by spectators, theater has actually been competition-centered since its inception. In ancient Greece, plays were performed at theater festivals, not just to entertain, but also with hopes of winning the competition, and consequently, the money and fame that came with the win. The atmosphere around such festivals has been likened to American society’s general infatuation with the Super Bowl – they were a pretty big deal to the Greeks. Today, there are still playwright and theater competitions, and few things are more cut-throat than the audition process that is the root of the majority of performing arts. [4] [5]
The insistence of certain art forms being included in the category of “sports” often seems to be a one-way argument, despite the overlapping attributes existing in both directions. As mentioned above, the first definition associated with art – “skill acquired by experience, study, or observation” – transfers easily to any area of sports, suggesting the possibility that sports could also be considered art forms.
Looking at the process of an athlete learning to hurdle when compared to an aspiring visual artist learning to draw, the steps run quite parallel. One cannot produce a realistic portrait, nor come out of the starting blocks and run a smooth hurdle race, without possessing a sufficient foundation. The athlete should be technically sound in sprint form prior to bringing hurdles into the mix. They should be running on the balls of the feet, knees and heels coming up with each stride, toes pointing up, a slight forward lean from the hips, arms under control – all things that should be taught, and mastered, on flat ground, before bringing out the hurdles. Likewise, when learning to draw, one should first learn the various basic methods used to mark paper with a pencil. One should grasp the concepts of, and see the differences between, an even, back-and-forth motion, hatching with tiny tick marks and strategic spacing, cross hatching, scribbling with random formation and different pressure applied, stippling with tiny dots, and, lastly, blending any of the previously-made marks to create different effects. [6]
Once the foundational sprint principles have been practiced and solidified, the hurdler is ready to add individual, hurdle-specific mechanical drills involving the lead leg, trail leg, lead arm and trail arm. Meanwhile, the artist learns to combine the previously-learned markings and recognize the basic shapes, of which more intricate figures are comprised.
Now our hurdler is ready to put together the separate aspects of lead arm, lead leg, trail arm, and trail leg in order to begin discovering what the motion feels like as a whole. Our artist is ready to take basic shapes and start combining them into more complex ones. It is at this point that both of our students can begin to really flourish. They may practice, make adjustments, then practice some more. They may each come up with new ideas, quickly scrap some of those ideas, incorporate the helpful ones into their repertoires and begin to explore, finding their unique, individual styles and rhythms as they work to master their art of choice. [6]
We previously established that some of the competitive aspects commonly associated with athletics also apply to the arts. On the surface, the arguably more ambiguous term “creative,” used to define “art,” may seem to belong solely in the art circle of our venn diagram. Looking at the similarities in the processes helps to jump-start rethinking that restrictive designation. I believe there is a substantial element of creativity involved in any sport if we are talking about a serious athlete who is committed to learning and becoming the best that he or she is capable of within his or her chosen sport.
With the hurdles, ideally the theme of creativity shows up in just about every facet. The coach thinks creatively when planning practices. He or she must figure out each individual hurdler’s strengths and weaknesses and come up with effective methods to help them improve, and let’s be real, hurdling, technical as it may be, is not a “one size fits all” situation. Each team member comes with his or her own history. Previous track and field experience, or lack thereof, may affect runners’ form, how they relate to coaches, how they accept corrections, technical idiosyncrasies, their approaches to learning the hurdles, and the list goes on. Each athlete has his or her own set of unique strengths and weaknesses. Each has individualized flaws in technique. An exercise that helps one athlete learn to keep his or her lead arm working with the body’s forward momentum rather than against it, may not at all help a teammate who is having a similar issue. Coming up with appropriate practice methods, effectively communicating them to the hurdlers and further tweaking drills in order to target each athlete’s specific needs at any specific moment, all take some serious creative thinking by the coach.
It doesn’t all fall on the coach though. The hurdler must also get creative in the process of learning, practicing, and racing. Each athlete is uniquely aware, on some level, of his or her authentic, unfiltered self. Each has knowledge around how he or she learns best, how he or she motivates from within, how he or she reacts to potential pressures. Each individual hurdler is the first to know if something feels magically right, or if something feels really off. He or she is the only person to experience the practice, or race, from the inside. An astute hurdler may combine his or her personal knowledge of self and the ability to gauge internal feeling with feedback from coaches, as well as observation of other skilled hurdlers, in order to contribute valuable insight and ideas to a practice session. Come race day, the hurdler able to creatively think and problem-solve, independently and on the spot, is more likely to take the inevitable unexpected variables in stride, unlike the hurdler looking to the coach for all the answers.
When you step back and look at the big picture, athletics and the arts are closely comparable. The lessons learned from each are interchangeable: self-discipline, putting in the necessary hours of work to feel prepared, communication, focus, listening to others, dealing with victories as well as defeats. A person participating whole-heartedly in a sport shares the same drive for excellence and ultimate mastery as one who is focusing on an area of art. They share a common level of passion, a common desire to push the envelope on what has been, and what can be achieved. Sports and art also share the unique ability to connect people, communicate ideas and feelings, physical and emotional expression, all across barriers – whether cultural, generational, linguistic or other. They are true universal languages, one thing of which the world can never have too many.
References:
[1] https://www.lexico.com/definition/sport
[2] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/art
[3] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/performing%20arts
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theatre_of_ancient_Greece
[5] https://www.onstageblog.com/columns/2017/11/30/theater-is-competition
[6] https://mymodernmet.com/basic-drawing-techniques/
[7] https://www.theodysseyonline.com/what-defines-sport
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