UStA Hosts Take the StAge 2025!
The University of St Andrews Dance Club hosts Take the StAge, a university dance competition, every February! This year, the competition welcomed 9 universities and over 350 dancers from across Scotland including our own Blue Angels and Highland Fusion competitive dance teams that took home 11 trophies this year!
The club is one of the largest sports clubs at the university currently sitting at over 300 members. Saints Dance offers 21 weekly classes in over 11 styles of dance as well as workshops, collaborations, socials, and multiple performance opportunities!
In addition to the recreational classes, the club is home to two teams, Blue Angels and Highland Fusion. Blue Angels has over 50 members and is comprised of 11 teams in varying styles and levels. The team competes at 4 competitions every year as well as performing in their two annual shows. Highland Fusion is made of 2 teams focused on the traditional highland dance style. The Performance Highland Fusion team prepares dances and demonstrations to perform at local and university events as well as preparing for their annual show Touch of Tartan. The Competitive Highland Fusion team competes alongside the Blue Angels at 2 competitions each year.
At Take the StAge this year, we saw 74 dances in over 8 styles and a total of 54 trophies were handed out. The competition brought in 3 qualified external judges and even had over 160 guests in the audience! Dancers from various universities were in attendance, including:
- University of Aberdeen
- Abertay University
- University of Dundee
- Edinburgh Napier University
- University of Glasgow
- Glasgow Caledonian University
- Queen Margaret University
- Robert Gordon UniversityUniversity of St Andrews
Saints Dance’s two competitive teams, Blue Angels and Highland Fusion, kicked off their competition season at Take the StAge taking home 11 trophies, including:
Highland Fusion
- Highland: 2nd place 🥈
Blue Angels
- Intermediate Ballet: 1st place 🥇
- Advanced Ballet: 1st place 🥇
- Advanced Contemporary: 2nd place 🥈
- Intermediate Jazz: 2nd place 🥈
- Advanced Jazz: 3rd place 🥉
- Advanced Tap: 2nd place 🥈
- Advanced Hip Hop: 1st place 🥇 and highest scoring piece 🏆
- Wildcard: 2nd place 🥈
The spectaculars sets of performances also won the UStA team Best Overall University.
In a blurb provided by Dance Club member Natalie Erskine, she mentioned ‘The event would not have been possible without over 20 additional volunteers assisting the night before and day of including runners, door monitors, and first aid. In addition to the prepared dances, we hosted our annual mini-competition Battle of the Tricks that involved 14 dancers from different university’s and raised over £40 for our charity SupportED. The operations of Dance Club are managed entirely by over 50 dedicated volunteers. This year we worked with the DSN to ensure our volunteers are accessibility trained to keep Dance Club a welcoming place. The club also strives for financial accessibility which is why we work hard to keep the general membership as low as possible and were the first club to start bursaries at Saints Sport for our team memberships.’
Congratulations to the UStA Dance Club for an amazing rendition of Take the StAge and for their amazing achievements this year!