Can someone please go into detail about what is bronze, silver and gold? And do franchised studios have different standards?

Dear Magiclmp...
The terms bronze, silver, and gold level refer to a list of figures of varying difficulties pertaining to each of the ten International and nine American Style Ballroom (standard) and Latin dances (or Smooth and Rhythm as they are called for the American counterparts). Usually, the bronze is the beginner level and has the most basic of steps. Vis-a-vis, the basic in the cha-cha, the NewYorker (same as the cross over break), fifth position break, under arm turn etc... The silver is slightly more advanced and involved, and the gold level steps are the most advanced of the "Syllabus" figures.

We can get into this later, but competitive dancers sometime perform amalgamations or variations of syllabus figures, which is referred to as open (open gold usually), to distinguish from the syllabus figures.

The following URL will give you a list of International Standard and Latin figures as decreed by the ISTD (Imperial Society of Teachers of Dancing, I think). At the bottom of the page is also a link to the IDTA designated figures. You will see that some figures referred to as Bronze Level in one are Gold Level in another, but they are mostly identical.
http://www.dsp.rice.edu/~aria/syllabus_ISTD.html

I hope you will learn a great deal from this. There is also a link to the American Syllabus figures at the bottom of the aforementioned page. From my understanding, most franchise studios have their own figure names and figure lists, loosely based on the IDTA nomenclature of figures. So, if you can recognize a figure by its description, you might be able to look in here and find out to which level it pertains.

Allow me to add that both Aria, who composed the list above (as well as Let's Dance) and Henry (of the famed Henry's Dance Hotlist) are both alums of the Univ of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and its ballroom dance club, the Dancing Illini. And here I am, a fellow DI dancer, spending inordinate amounts of time responding to dance related questions. Something in the water there perhaps????

Happy dancing. Good luck.

Sriram Shankar.

Sriram,

Thank you for taking the time to write that very informative post. You spared me the trouble.

As the webmaster of ballroomdancers.com, I'd just like to add that most of the steps you find on our site are considered Intermediate Bronze (and some Full Bronze) by most standards.

OTOH the variations are all considered "Open", since they are outside of all syllabi, American or International. Some are Open Bronze, others open Silver or Gold. We try to vary the levels to appeal to as many people as possible.

Actually now that I think about it, there were two variations recently that were within closed American syllabus standards: The Rumba variation with the shadow rocks & Spirals, and the recent Foxtrot promenade variations.

Sincerely,
Jonathan Atkinson