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Colman

Just4DoingDance
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Everything posted by Colman

  1. I do faintly wonder why a ballet-only organisation feel the need to run non-ballet classes as a part of that. (Which would put off both of our boys.)
  2. RAD prerequisites here - https://www.royalacademyofdance.org/exams/prerequisites-age-requirements/ - note the accepted equivalents. I've heard a recommendation of doing a level below when transferring, just to get used to the differences in requirements, but basically not a problem.
  3. 7 is a bit young for events. Keep an eye on RAD Project B stuff, but their event in April is for 8+. I don't know how hard that age limit is, of course. I thought LBBS had evaporated, but I'm told their Facebook is still active, so maybe contact them: our two did online classes with them over lockdown and they were pretty good. I think they're running online classes again, which might be an option for a few classes in a "look, other boys" sort of way - we were lucky, we had another family with two boys in classes when our two started, so we had a little suburban ballet school with *five* boys dancing (including me). I would expect most of the RAD workshops to have a few boys - maybe contact organisers and get a feel for which would be most appropriate?
  4. First part of Discovering Rep in May apparently. Anyone done those exams? How did your teacher break them down? Separate sessions for each?
  5. It's also one of those breakpoint ages when kids just dump pursuits. I can't remember where it is in the changing of schools in UK terms. So some of them may not want to be there, but may just be marking time until they're allowed stop.
  6. How old are they? Why are they there?
  7. I can imagine both people delaying leaving until after they’d got things back onto an even keel and being burned out after the mayhem.
  8. Or moves being delayed by lockdown and the aftermath. Companies and schools have had time to get back to normal, so now people can move in good conscience?
  9. My account is limited by admins in an effort to stop me reacting badly to reactionary posters and upsetting them*. I have my own special group "Just4DoingDance". I'm only allowed post or comment in Doing Dance and the ticket forum as far as I know, and I can't like posts or be liked. (* The admins might phrase this differently. It's the least tendentious way I can think to put it. 🤷‍♂️)
  10. I’ve always been suspicious of teachers - of martial arts or dance - who discourage their students from training more widely. Specific concerns about programmes or teachers are one thing, but a blanket discouragement - or outright forbidding it - suggests both insecurity in their own teaching and an inappropriate possessiveness. It’s good manners to inform them and (perhaps) ask their advice, but all the good teachers I know have encouraged training elsewhere (except maybe when training a new style of martial art or dance when you aren’t reasonably secure in the current one, which can lead to confusing crossover and learning neither well.)
  11. You’d need to say something like “formalised European dance”. For example ballet wouldn’t have much influence on old style sean-nós Irish dancing, I think, but certainly would have on the version formalised by members of the late 19th C British middle class.
  12. It does seem to be at odds with modern best practice, but a lot of these problems seem to be more perpetuation of past cycles of abusive practice than based in professionally reasoned positions. "Never did me any harm. <twitch>" I can see a certain logic to it: I'm pretty sure that our 15 year old - not in vocational school - has been passed over for things because he's a bit too chubby for some people's preferences, but the idea that he could actually build enough strength to dance at 10% body fat or whatever they think is desirable is just contrary to all the science. He can cut when he's an adult if he needs to. If he'd been a girl, missing those opportunities would probably have been lethal to his hopes, but given the demand for boys here - especially post-lockdown, where (in Ireland at least) we seem to have lost a generation of teenage boys from ballet - it's not such a problem. So if you expect powerful people with an unhealthy relationship to both food and body fat to be making the decisions about who's good enough, you'll try to fit into their preferences.
  13. I find myself unexpectedly in London that weekend with the 15 year old boy as we have some PDD workshops to do. Though SMBallet has precedence here:
  14. But they don't have to code switch - helps to have dance wear to get into the right mindset for class when dance isn't your job.
  15. Leggings or proper dance tights/dance shorts. Not the black ballet tights like ladies' tights you see sold as mens tights in shops, which are far too see through, but something properly opaque. Something like: https://dvrs.shop/prodotto/plain-ankle-tights/ or https://wearmoi.com/en/tights/268-2642-orion.html#/27-size-s/101-color-black or https://www.capezio.uk/studio-collection-legging-mens. Running leggings will do too if you're not near good dance shops or don't want to ship but the dance ones tend to have much higher waists so if your top rides up you won't be excessively exposed. I prefer not to wear footed tights if I don't need to for a performance or something, but preferences vary. I'm mostly in Diverso stuff at the moment, since they'll make it in bigger sizes at no extra cost. You didn't ask about dance belts, but following on from the above: get a dance belt. Then, if you don't like that one, get a different one and repeat until you're happy. *I'd* avoid the common quilted Capezio ones which seem to be easiest to get and go for something padded like the Wear Moi models - they're more modest and the Capezio thong ones are much less comfortable. (in my experience, and the choice of dance belt is very much personal (I don't like full-seat dance belts at all!))
  16. There's a thread of ballet teaching that's been inherited from military training schools or czarist academies (or possibly just English public schools) - maybe it's the ancient fencing connection - and bad martial arts teachers. Students are disposable assets to be thrown away if they don't survive the ordeals.
  17. My remark about productivity and outdated U.K. management practices wasn’t off topic.
  18. There are a good number of economists who are willing to blame out of date rubbish management practices for a lot of the UK’s terrible productivity figures,
  19. With the delightful Karis Scarlette, who's a lot of fun to train with: she was doing a workshop in Dublin this weekend. If you happen to have quite a lot of thousands of pounds/euros down the back of the couch, obviously.
  20. Yes, and it’s exactly the right type of work to fend off the dangerous age related deteriorations that eventually lead to cascade failure. With a bit of luck you’ll be able to get better at it for a decade or three. (But why wait until you retire?) If you’ve done IF you should be able to keep up with almost any of the adult workshops/retreats that people run. Karris Scarlette, London Ballet Classes, Everybody Ballet are the three we normally go to, but I’m trying to get around to the Ballet Retreat ones as well. You might be a bit overwhelmed by trying to learn rep at the speed they have to cover it in a workshop, but that’s normal. No one cares* so long as you’re not in the way, so the rule is: be in the right place first, then worry about technique. If the level is set much above IF/Grade 6 they wouldn’t be able to sell enough places! (* Actually, there was one choreographer that I think wasn’t best pleased to see the group of less experienced people and less ballet shaped group I was in butchering his piece, but hey, he got paid.)
  21. BMI was invented as a tool to look at changes in population weights over time. It's completely useless at an individual level - the only possible use for it is to give a doctor an excuse to open a conversation to a patient who clearly has too high a body fat percentage. It's especially useless for athletes - the classic being international rugby teams full of "morbidly obese" players - and adolescents. It's a cheap, easy and utterly inaccurate proxy for body fat % (unless, perhaps, you're a male white college student in the 1950s, which is were most of this sort of thing was originally calibrated). (Even using BMI at a population level is complicated - how much of the increase is due to the fashion for bodybuilding, or the changes in ethnic makeup of the population?)
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