Haha! I've taken thousands of bad dance pictures, but luckily among those thousands there have been a few of redeeming quality.

My strategy has always been, play with my manual settings until I get crisp pictures in the light level (Varying ISO and Aperture) , then vary my zoom depending on the size of the group and the required focus.

I'm lucky to have a pretty good camera body, that does a tremendous job with autofocus, but the ISO abilities in the new body were really key to me starting to get better long distance dance photos.

I'll be posting dance photos over the next few weeks as I get more familiar with the platform, so feel free to follow if I have content you think would be interesting.