Kate_N

At 28, you're unlikely to become a professional performing dancer, unless you have an extraordinary talent. But even those dancers who have trained from the age of 9 or 10 will not be guaranteed a performing career unless they're exceptionally talented - it's a very tough world. But a degree in dance could give you the professional skills to work in the creative industries more generally - as a teacher, an outreach/education officer, dance therapist and so on. 

The kinds of degrees available will largely depend on where you're located. In the UK, USA, Australia, elsewhere?

As an adult, any kind of physical training is great! Weightlifting won't necessarily harm you learning ballet - partly because, starting to learn ballet as an adult is completely different from learning as a child/young teenager. Other kinds of exercise will help because they build strength and body awareness: you get to learn about your body, muscles, alignment and so on. 

Can I give you some broader advice? As an adult, starting ballet late, you have to decide why you're dancing. You won't become a professional ballet dancer - I think it's fair to say that straight out. You need to make peace with that - I've seen adult dancers get themselves tied up in emotional knots because of a yearning that can't be satisfied. But you can learn for pleasure and the joy & sense of achievement in beginning to master a difficult art.

That's the way to approach learning ballet at 28: and then answers to your other questions flow from that - as Cara says, exercise and diet become part of a generally healthy lifestuyle, and not really just because you've started learning ballet.

I hope you've found inspiring teachers and good classmates - the world of adult ballet can be very exciting in learning new & challenging things, with nurturing teachers and fellow dancers' camaraderie. 

What a wonderful programme! 

I'd endorse everything Invisiblecircus says.

And the very hard facts are that if your DD isn't good enough to get into the conservatoires, then her career will be quite different. It will be possible to have a career in dance, but it won't necessarily be a straight line. However, I"m not sure many careers in the arts & humanities will be straight lines in the future.

University degrees in dance will be like any Bachelor of Arts: as well as subject content & knowledge, there will be broad training in the arts and humanities, training you as a critical thinker and a researcher; training you in developing your own projects, working in groups & project teams, writing, reading, thinking, discussing, debating. There will likely be one technique class each day, but you'll need to be self-directed & develop your own practice, thus, as Invisiblecircus says, preparing you for freelance work.

Conservatoires (Rambert, Laban et al.) are much more like vocational schools, although there is a necessary proportion of critical studies content.

You can look to the QAA Benchmarking statements to see what the national requirements are.

http://www.qaa.ac.uk/publications/information-and-guidance/publication?PubID=2964#.WXMEeNMrIfw

( I teach in a related performing arts university department, with dance included. My Dance colleague trained at The Place & still performs professionally).

Oh wow! Is that the one Danceworks have put on their FB page! Your lucky boy!

20 hours ago, meadowblythe said:

I suspect there are plenty of us who know, deep down, although our children may have a career in dance, the chances are they may never dance in the very top companies.

And the children themselves may change direction in the course of their intense studies.

The now-adult child  of a friend of mine in one of the best contemporary dance training programmes in the country, with offers of joining a couple of well-regarded companies as a dancer, has decided that they don't want to live that life, but want to work as a multi-disciplinary community artist. 

That was the outcome of the three years of professional training, which has equipped this DC to become an autonomous and reflective artist. 

There is a day off - but it's a Friday, not a Sunday. 

It looks OK if your DD works up to it gradually! And I'd be looking at what the 6 hours on a Saturday comprises. 

But most of the posts I read here (and on other ballet sites) from UK-based dancers (or their parents) are about not being able to have access to enough hours of quality training, rather than too many! This looks like a sensible timetable in that pointe is only ever after a proper length of ballet technique class ie 90 minutes. At 14, maybe an hour pf pointe is too much - 30 minutes would probably be OK, especially as it's 3 times a week.

But your DD is fortunate to have access to ballet 6 days a week - which is pretty much on track for a serious 14 year old, I should have thought.

ooo weird. I will be doing that class this coming Sunday - a very odd image ... Usually, when that teacher takes that class, in my experience, she says very little & gives very few corrections. Maybe she talks more now!

On 27/06/2017 at 00:39, Viv said:

I don't realise I'm doing it, I genuinely think I'm working hard, but without my current exam teacher giving me her razor eyed stare and simply saying 'foot' I would really think that I was pointing as hard as I could, until I point harder and realise I was slacking hahaha.

Oh I know that feeling!

I was just trying to think about how an adult might get the same benefit from a syllabus, but without doing exams - as Peanut had said upthread that she found it difficult to get to classes consistently enough to do the syllabus work - that's the problem for adult learners: our brains catch up & surpass our bodies/ understanding of the work, but LIFE gets in the way ....

I've been watching Twitter for NPO results - some really really good news all round for the performing arts. And an effort to start to redress the overwheening dominance of London-based organisations. There will still not be a full balancing out of the amount spent per head on Londoners and the majority of the population of the United Kingdom, but at least there's a recognition that we all pay the same taxes, and might well have artists in our midst, outside of the M25!

There are some very encouraging signs in the mix of support for established artists, and emerging artists. These are very tough times for public funding, but it seems the government is listening to economists who tell them how much the creative industries generate in GDP for the UK.

I'm not so sold on going in for exams. I think there's a problem with getting fixated on syllabus work. Doing open classes gives you more skills in picking things up -  although there is a complementary loss of learning through progressive steps, I recognise that.

But could you take what might be the motivation for wanting to do an exam, as Viv puts it so well? The concrete goal to work towards?

Could you identify aspects of the exam material you want to work towards, and set your own personal goals. Such as:

clean single pirouettes with a neat controlled landing 

or bold double pirouettes with a reasonable landing 

or learning to get lightness & ballon in petit allegro

(these are my goals at the moment, can't you tell?) 

Oh wow! watching sounds great - do come back here & report to us!

Yes, I've had that email as well. I just assumed that it was a standard informational one, not so much a personal invitation. All the information on the website suggests this is very much for young dancers at, or aspiring to, vocational school - the Danceworks YouTube site shows clips from Ms DePrince's workshop last year, & you can see the standard. She looks like a lovely teacher!

There are actually quite significant differences between ballet and gymnastics training and technique - I'm sure we could all list several of them! The one I notice in gymnastics is the style of the hyperextended back and thus a displaced alignment of the pelvis and turn out. 

I've  heard ballet teachers say that after the age of around 10 or 11 children can't do both gymnastics and ballet, if they want to get serious with ballet, because technique-wise they work very differently. 

From what I understand at Danceworks, these are very much for young advanced dancers. Probably not for adults -even those of us doing ballet as a serious hobby!

Gosh! who knew flexibility was so controversial?  <grin>

I hope it's OK still to post? Because I was talking to a friend (a professional dancer) who said that he stopped doing hard stretching in class and after class unless it was the last class/rehearsal of the day. The physiology is thus (I hope if I'm wrong, DrDance can correct me):  the really hard stretching to develop increased flexibility works by actually doing minor, minor damage to tissue fibres (muscles especially) - they stretch to just a tiny bit beyond capacity, and heal looser than before.

In class, you're actually working on strength, and building strength in the muscles. So why would you weaken those muscles in the middle of strengthening them? that was my friend's revelation about that tradition of over-stretching between barre & centre. He does his stretching after rehearsals etc, when the body can then heal over night.

I think this is very interesting (and I hope my non-medico Dr explanation makes sense!).

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but current reports seem to suggest that we should be wary of using the term "terrorism" to describe it.

I understand that the press can't call the perpetrator a terrorist (although we know he is) because he will be standing trial. In other attacks, the attackers themselves have died as part of their murder plans. 

We have to remember, though, that there is still more danger in driving a car, than from terrorist incidents. But of course, it doesn't feel like that, as it's only rarely that drivers use their cars as weapons with a deadly intent.

PetalViolet, we need more tales of #NotaBalletMum ;-)

The men in my family are all around 6' and women between 5' 2" and 5' 8". I wasn't particularly tall until I had a growth spurt at about the age of 16. I'm now around 5' 6" but appear taller because of ballet! Straight back etc. 

The thing is, actually, there's nothing you can do. As far as I understand it, height is mostly genetic. In times/places of nutritional scarcity - famine, war - people aren't so tall, but that is not the case now. But while famine or food restriction because of calamity (war time rationing for example) might inhibit growth, but as far as I know, the reverse is not true: eating more won't make you grow taller!

Take the advice here, and eat healthily, and think of food as the essential source of nutrition and energy to enable you to be healthy and fuel your dancing. 

Edited to add: the other thing you might take into account (but don't need to discuss here if you don't wish to) is the menarche - the onset of menstruation. There is often a link between the development of  weight, height, and menstruation in young women. I'm not a medico, so can't tell you how that works! Maybe DrDance knows more about this.

But think of it as your body being busy doing a lot of stuff, so height may be delayed while other things are going on in your endocrinal system  - as I say, I had a growth spurt at 16, and now I remember it, so did my father.

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Perhaps you might be the oldest starting professional ballerina? Who knows! If you work really really hard, have money and time and an exceptional teacher(s)...and prodigious natural talent and passion

A lovely thought, but physiologically almost impossible - some of the muscles, etc need to be trained from early age - at the very latest 11 or 12. I saw that [awful] film Black Swan - it was VERY easy to see that the lead actress was not a trained professional dancer. She may have been thin, but she didn't have the honed, trained musclature, and her dancing wasn't up to it.

It does not help Jellyfish to give her/him a false hope, in my view.

However, contemporary dance is an area that late starters can work in & be paid for - if they have the physical facility, the kinaesthetic learning ability, enough musicality, and the energy. But Jellyfish has said that contemporary dance is not of interest -- that's a mistake, as contemporary dance is a field where very late starters (anyone over 18) might be able to scratch a living.

Your questions actually come across as quite odd, Jellyfish. Have you read up about ballet careers? Have you been to dance performances? Have you seen or read any interviews with dancers? If you had done any of these things, you'd realise the answers to your questions.

On 06/06/2017 at 16:31, ArucariaBallerina said:

Slightly different topic, but the dance school newsletter has just come out, and apparently all Grade 3 pupils are going on pointe from September... This worries me! Some of them are elevenish, Elmhurst associates and have been dancing seriously for a long time, but others can be as young as 8, most of them only once a week dancers with (sorry to say it) not very good technique, no posture or turnout really, including those who only started dancing a couple of months ago! I'm scared for them in case they injure themselves, and also slightly miffed that it took me almost 2 years and hard daily home practice to get my pointe shoes, and look at them  

Arucaria, you are right to be sceptical about this, but I'm afraid there's probably not much that you, as another young student in the studio, can do. My advice would be to focus on your own training. Although I think a number of us here would be wondering whether the studio at which you're studying is the best available to you, if that is their policy about putting students on pointe (at 8 years old, I mean). 

But this announcement would start me wondering about the necessity of a move to a more professional studio at some point in the next couple of years. Different studios have talents for different things, or different levels in a student's training - the studio that starts off young "baby ballet" dancers, may not be the studio for the dancers who will graduate into serious training at, say 12, or into further more serious training at 16. And so on. This doesn't mean that the studio where children start is a bad studio. Just that sometimes one studio can't accommodate the range & level of students' needs as they develop & grow in their training.

The studio I go to sends its children who want to make a serious study of ballet past the age of about 10 or so to other local schools where there is specialisation in the pre-teens & teens training, to get them to vocational school. I really admire my teacher/studio-owner for doing that, as she serves the best interests of her students, rather than her self-interest.

Jellyfish, sadly, and bluntly, there is no chance that you would ever become a dancer with the Royal Ballet, starting at 23. Ballet training to get you to that elite level (one of THE best companies in the world) needs to begin at age 8 or 9, but must be combined with the right kind of physical facility, and the ability of an performing artist to communicate.

There are many ways you can dance as an adult beginner, however. There is lots of discussion of these opportunities on this forum - there are open classes in dance studios across the country (I'm assuming you're in the UK), structured syllabus classes for adult beginners in various locations (RAD and Morley College are two that spring to mind), and then when you have a bit of learning under your belt (or in your feet!) you can participate in various amateur dance companies - again, a search of this forum will give you some ideas.

Welcome to the wonderful world of adult ballet students!

Generally, training for ballet is better in open classes. Part of dancing professionally is dancing in large groups. And in a ballet class with others, there is the peer & group learning (eg learning from a correction given to others, watching the effect when a teacher adjusts an other student), and the general camaraderie and getting along in the dance world. You learn how to share space, how to move in relation to other bodies in the space - really important aspects of dancing professionally (don't get me started on how most people are spatially unaware in public space). 

This is certainly something that comes up with the US hothoused "phenoms" (as they call them) who are often trained privately. Anecdotally (and I know anecdote is not the singular of data!) I've heard that this is can be why these prize winning "Infant Phenomena" dancers often find company life (especially starting in the corps) difficult.

Ideally, your son would do regular classes, the Associates Scheme and a private lesson to work on specific issues. But it's generally recommended that privates are used for specific issues and competition coaching. If it's about him catching up, then the Associates classes might be better. He (and you) will also be able to meet other dancers & teachers outside your own studio & town. I think this is quite important in the education of artists.

22 hours ago, mph said:

despite the fact that   women  are just as capable of being abusers ...   
 

I'm sorry but this statement cannot go unchallenged: as you say, women as "just as capable of being abusers." But the statistical evidence, and evidence from our justice system confirms that, on the whole, women DON'T abuse children. It is [some] men who commit the vast majority of child abuse. The stat is somewhere around the 90% mark (if not higher). And 75% of victims of their abuse are girls/women.

And what you call "structural discrimination" against male professionals in safeguarding situations, others might call a long-overdue care for young people, particularly girls (and women in workplaces re sexual harassment), and a no-tolerance attitude to masculinist assumptions of their "rights" to do what they wish to/with young girls (and sometimes boys). I think we only have to look at the changes in attitudes towards the recent high-profile historical sexual abuse cases to see the results of earlier attitudes towards a sense of male "entitlement" to female bodies.

If this makes things more difficult for the good men now (the majority of men, in other words), then I would hope that they understand why we are now extra-careful, and live with those constraints (after all, women live within the constraints of male violence all the time). The excesses of the past leave their marks - on individuals, and society.

On 05/06/2017 at 15:44, mph said:

then there;s the presumption that a male teacher  cannot  teach  the higher  levels for female students  becasue  the traditionalists assert that  boys  don't (and shouldn't  unless playing Bottom in  Dream)  do pointe ... 
 

I don't see what you're arguing here: it's entirely possible to teach pointe work when not on pointe oneself. Male teachers and choreographers have been doing it from the start of the evolution of the pointe show.

In fact, the pointe shoe was "invented" at the behest of a male choreographer & teacher back in 1840s - the first pointe shoe was the standard satin slipper with strips of paste & paper on the inside of the shoe at the toes, and darning on the outside, to reinforce. Increduble skill & strength required.

And as for ballet being a female dominated profession? Hmmmmmmm. Not so sure about that - most significant companies worldwide are directed by men. Most choreographers seen as "important" are men. The usual pattern I see in the profession (and quite up close - it abuts onto my professional expertise as well as my hobby) is the leading "artist" (male) and his assistant (female). The ballet world is  part of our society, and reflects patriarchal structures just as much as any other area of contemporary society.

18 hours ago, taxi4ballet said:

 If anything, I've found that people in the performing arts world seem to have a far greater acceptance of sex/gender differences.

Absolutely, Taxi4Ballet! Thanks for saying that so clearly.

I was brought up in the theatre (on-stage in utero in fact!) and I think it is a brilliant environment in which to raise & train children.

What you learn is that first & foremost, success is about hard work, discipline, and generosity. That it's about the work, not your ego or your feelings. And that things of great beauty take years of skill and love. And children of the "once a week" variety (and their parents) can see that as much as anyone else.