Some of Cochrane's talented dancers have already had an opportunity to be adjudicated at their first festival.

The 13th annual Class Act Festival at MacEwan Hall in Calgary was held on the weekend of March 23 and featured dancers from nine different Calgary and area studios.

Heather Gordon, Dance Instructor with Eurhythmics Dance Studio, says they had a large group of both competitive and pre-competitive dancers take the stage. "We had a whole bunch of first time performers that had never competed before so it was exciting for both us and them. We had 76 numbers go to competition both from our competitive and pre-competitive team; including groups, solos, duets and trios."

For the first dance festival of the season, Gordon shares the dancers did extremely well. "We came home with quite a few extra awards. A lot of our groups and soloists received outstanding, a lot of most promising, choreography awards and some adjudicator's choice; in terms of extra awards, it was super successful. With medal placements, we came home with 24 high gold, 37 gold, 8 high silver and 7 silver."

While receiving high scores is great, Gordon says as a studio they don't place a lot of weight on who does the best. "We never base our festival experiences on what they come home with besides the lessons they have learned."

From now until their next festival, dancers will continue working on building their technical skills, routines as well as the adjudicator's feedback points from Class Act. "We go over the comments and start applying them so we have more opinions than our own which is one of the reasons why we compete."

Gordon shares from the dancers' perspective, they were all quite happy. "All of our kids love being on stage, there inevitably nerves but our kids' did wonderfully in terms of their interactions with other dancers. All our kids are amazingly respectful, have high energy, excited and happy to be on stage. So it's really wonderful to sit back as an instructor and watch that...it makes us really proud."

Next up for the Eurhythmics dancers is Dance Invasion at RockPointe Church on April 26 to 28 where they will join dancers from Cochrane's other studio, Snap Dance.