The European Tournament for Dancing Students or ETDS is a recurring tournament for ballroom and Latin-American dancing for students from Europe.
The tournament is held twice a year, once during the Pentecost weekend and once in autumn. The event always starts on a Friday evening and ends on the following Monday morning. Although each ETDS is organised by a different party, the structure remains fairly constant: on Friday evening, the blind date program takes place, in which dancers without a partner can try to find someone with which to compete in one or both dance disciplines. Blind dating is also a motivation for some dancers that want to meet new people. On Saturday, the ballroom tournament for the breitensport class (German, meaning amateur sports for the masses) takes place and the Latin-American tournament for the open class as well as, if so chosen by the organising party, for the CloseD class. On Sunday, all classes dance the respective other discipline. The event ends on Monday with a last common breakfast.
The organisation of each tournament is in the hands of a different participating university. The tournament takes place in the city of the organising university, the location changing every half year to another European city. So far, the tournament has taken place most of the times either in Germany or the Netherlands. In autumn 2015, the ETDS took place in Czech Republic, breaking that series for the first time. With the participation of some students from South Africa, it also premiered hosting dancers from outside Europe.
Although the primary focus of the ETDS lies in organising a tournament of high standards, the event equally aims at creating a social happening where dancers from all of Europe can meet each other. This is encouraged by the possibility to blind date and by a themed festival ("motto party") on the event's Saturday evening and a gala ball on Sunday evening.
The sleeping accommodation is commonly a local gym.
The ETDS was founded by the university dance teams of Clausthal, Braunschweig and Kiel, who agreed to get to know each other during a tournament. The event was organised by these three German universities for a number of times. There was not a regular structure, but the tournament was organised ad hoc. Finding a sleeping accommodation was easy, as the number of participants was still very low.
In November 1990, a tournament prize was introduced that has been used ever since, “der tanzmaus” (German for “the dance mouse”), a pluche mouse. The tanzmaus was a donation of the university of Kiel; Clausthal was the first university to win the mouse. It is given to the winning university which "hosts" the prize until the next ETDS.
In December 1991, a tournament during Sinterklaas took place. The tournament gained more participants and Berlin started participating as well. Berlin won the dance mouse during this Sinterklaas tournament, and promised to organise the event somewhere in the future. During this tournament, only one class existed.
In April 1992, the tournament took place in Clausthal. This was the first tournament in which the team of Dortmund started participating. Some tournaments later, Ulm and Marburg started participating as well.
The University of Berlin fulfilled their promise in 1993 by taking care of the organisation of the tournament. The tournament still did not have separate classes.
The next tournament took place in the spring of 1994, and the tournament gained in popularity; fifteen universities from Germany participated. Also, for the first time, universities from the Netherlands started to participate. The new universities were from Mainz, Geisenheim, Kaiserslautern, Delft and Eindhoven.
During autumn of 1994, the number of participants had increased to such a high amount that problems started to arise between the organisation and the administration of Kiel. The result was that Kiel was disallowed to organise the event for five years.
The next tournament took place in the spring of 1995, and for the first time, the tournament was separated into two classes. They were called “amateurs” and “profis” ("professionals"). Leipzig also joined this tournament.
The tournament that was held in the summer of 1995 was the first event to take place in the Netherlands. The organisation was in the hands of ESDV Footloose from Eindhoven. Groningen joined during this tournament. From now on, the ETDS was no longer organised on an ad hoc basis, but was organised regularly twice each year, during Pentecost and in the autumn, each time by a different university.
The number of participants continued to grow, and around 2004 a third class, "masters", was added to the breitensport section. More than 500 participants took part in the 41st tournament in Groningen in May 2009, and another breitensport class by the name of “champions” was introduced.
The event continued to grow in popularity, and 570 participants were competing in the 47th edition during Pentecost, May 2012. In October 2015, the event was held for the first time in the Czech Republic, in the city of Brno. This was the first ETDS not organised in Germany or the Netherlands.
The ETDS for its 68th Edition will be hosted in the UK for the first time in November 2024 in Southampton, as a joint venture between the two societies' from the University of Bristol and University of Southampton.
Every ETDS organisation is allowed to make their own rules for the tournament. Each organisation describes rules about clothing and the calculation of the tanzmaus evaluation. Because the focus of each organization may be different, the balance between social orientation and competition changes slightly. Nevertheless, several rules exist during each tournament:
Dancers can sign up for two disciplines, standard and Latin-American.
In the breitensport class, only untrained and low level training dancers are allowed. Professional dancers, i.e. those who have reached a higher class in official tournaments held by dance associations, are excluded from the breitensport tournaments. They instead dance in the open class which ranges at least from B to S class dancers.
Some hosting universities decide to provide another separate tournament for a class called CloseD, which consists of dancers of the official D and C classes (varying between national dance associations). In case a separate tournament for this class is chosen not to be held, the organising team will classify the concerning dancers into either breitensport (D class) or open class (C class).
Participants that belong to a dance formation may also be required to dance in the CloseD or open class, depending on the league in which their formation is classified.
In the breitensport section, a pre-qualification round takes place, where each participating couple is classified into the amateur, professional ("profi"), master or the optional champion class, so that each couple will dance the subsequent actual tournament in a class that matches their levels. These tournaments follow the rules of official dancing tournaments. During the finals, open adjudication is sometimes performed, with each adjudicator showing their ranking of the couples on the floor immediately after each dance. However, closed adjudication is often chosen in order to save time. There are winner's certificates and medals for all participants in the finals as well as trophies (instead of medals) for the podium finishers.
In the respective disciplines, the following dances have to be performed (example rule set):
The ETDS has also seen separate competitions without class separation in Discofox, Salsa and Polka.
The adjudicators are chosen from volunteers of the participating universities that do not compete themselves in the discipline in which they judge. Adjudicators are selected by their adjudicator's license, by their experience and/or by their level of dancing in regular dance competitions.
A blind date couple consists of two dancers from different universities. Blind dating is mandatory in the CloseD and open classes (in the latter case sometimes being replaced by composing couples by the lot or by other rules), and stimulated in the breitensport by a blind date programme on Friday and Saturday for the following day's tournament. During the breitensport tournaments, a blind date couple can score more points for a university, and thereby improve their team's chance of winning the tanzmaus prize.
Every member of a student dancing society or university student can participate. Each couple dances under the flag of his or her university or dance society. Staff members of the university or dancing society are also allowed to participate. When universities have too few participants to compete for the tanzmaus, they can team up with other universities to improve their chances.
Every European university or student dance society can participate. In practice, a majority of the participants is German. The second largest participating party is from the Netherlands, and some dancers from the United Kingdom, Switzerland, Estonia, Norway and other neighbouring countries participate as well.
The record for the most teams participating in an ETDS was set at 54th ETDS Brno, where 37 teams from 11 countries took part. This was the first participation for the teams from Crimea/Ukraine, Lublin/Poland, Winterthur/Switzerland and Cape Town/South Africa.
From Germany, universities from the following cities have been participating in the ETDS:
In the Netherlands, the participants often dance under the flag of a dancing society, unlike in Germany, where participants dance under the flag of their university. From the Netherlands, the following cities have been participating in the ETDS:
From England, participants compete in the tournament under the flag of a university society, a subsidiary of the local university's Student Union.
Participating universities from the UK have included: