Kate_N

But the arts/performing arts world is not fair. Never has been, and although there have been changes & an effort to make the performing arts more diverse (eg Graeae or Theatre of the Deaf) I doubt that the basics will change. Historically, female ballet dancers have always been sought to idealise a particular female body type, connected with our cultural aesthetics of  [feminine] grace and fluidity of movement - so: small head, long neck, short torso in relation to long limbs. 

This doesn't mean that other body types are not good dancers - quite the contrary. But that aiming for professional success certain sectors  of the performing arts may be tricky. 

But ... there is more to the dancing life than a ballet company. Up & down the country there are well-trained dancing professionals working as teachers, dancers in the community, choreographers, school dance teachers, therapeutic workers with those with physical and/or learning disabilities. Not to mention singer/dancer/actors (the "triple threat") in stage shows all over the country.

Your daughter would be well-advised to learn some sort of musical instrument and singing. From what you write, she's young, so singing is probably not a priority at the moment - I was taught that the female voice doesn't mature until the early 20s. BUt a musical instrument would give her a take on the alternatives to "pure" ballet training.

In my University department, which includes some dance training, independent study or 'self-directed' work includes both library research AND practical work in the studio. We would expect our students to be starting to do their own warm ups and technical practice. After all, when you go into the world of work as a performer, you may only have a company job in a short-term contract basis. So when you're not working on a show or rehearsing, you'd need to be responsible for your own training.

Could you book one of the department studios for a couple of hours each day, and do further training - give yourself a class, and work on areas that are more of a challenge for you?

has anyone had a reply from LCD?

My daughter sent her application two weeks ago but has had no response.

 

You'll have to get used to the UCAS/CDET system. It's unlikely you'll get a reply straightaway, given numbers and complex admissions procedures. There's often a delay between the application going in through UCAS and it getting to the institutional admissions office, and then to the academic/teaching staff making decisions. And it's the start of term, so we're all sorting out timetables, panicking Freshers etc etc etc

Part of the time taken is to ensure transparency and parity across all applications.

I second Anna_C's advice (as usual!).

Right - general points about university: you are in Week 1 or 2 of your first year, right? The work hasn't really started yet. Have a look at what assessments and projects are coming up - you will find that your time after 1pm will soon be filled. 

We work out module/course workloads that for every hour of face to face teaching you receive, there should be another 3 to 4 hours of independent study undertaken by the student. As a dance student this might be, as others suggest, Pilates, cross-training, yoga. Also reading & writing, and seeing dance (often called 'Contextual studies"). This is part of adjusting to university, and excellent training for after graduation, when you may be working as an "independent dance artist" - you'll need to be making opportunities for yourself, working on your practice, and reflecting on it.

Some specifics: I know a little of the DMU set up (on the theatre side). There are some nice studios there, and if it's a half-way decent department, you'll eventually be set a lot of self-directed work, and you will also have been inducted into ways of booking rehearsal space for group & individual work, that is not scheduled face-to-face teaching. This is your responsibility as a self-directed artist/practitioner. It's good to get into the habit of daily self-directed practice.

Good luck & have fun! It's a wonderful opportunity to spend 3 years exploring the intersection of your own interests & talents, and the formal structure of contemporary dance training. Where are the harmonies, and where are the clashes? You learn MOST from the clashes and irritations, more than from the harmonies. 

The exercise when you do a tendu to second, then place the foot on the floor in second (rolling through the toes and instep) and then pulling your working leg back to first with foot still on the floor can really help. Try to do it without using the muscles in the working leg, just the supporting leg, maybe?

Of course, it's impossible to do without using the working leg, but by thinking mostly of engaging the supporting leg, you might start to recognise when the adductors are engaged?

Thanks for all your advice about tendonitis. I warmed up very slowly with lots of ankle rolling before last night's class, and my tendon felt much more mobile.

One question - if anyone knows the medical/technical answer: a running friend expressed confusion about why I feel constriction & pain on the contraction of the Achilles as I rise up to demi pointe, rather than when the tendon is stretched down as in a heel drop (which feel great). It's on the rise that I feel the injury. 

I was glued to my iPad watching the maestro Boris Akimov teaching the Bolshoi company class. He was just so watchable - such beautiful feet and arms. I had to go to a meeting just as the Royal Ballet were finishing barre. I found the difference in style of class between Mr Akimov and Mr Maloney in the class they give.

Mr Akimov sets very logical quite simple combinations; Mr Maloney was really working on a very squeezy juicy lyrical style. 

I have just enjoyed watching the Master teacher Boris Akimov teaching one of the Bolshoi company classes. Following along with my arms & feet as much as I can while ploughing through answers to yesterday's gazillion emails. I have meetings today from 12noon, which seems such a waste of time when I could be watching - and dancing along with bits I can do  - the RB's company class!

Great tips, everyone. THank you!

Adding to my list: get back to Pilates classes. I had a summer off from exercise other than ballet, so I'm hoping this is just a flare up when starting back into serious fitness training. My gym offers some good Pilates & bodybalance training.

Thank you, Harwel, that's very helpful. I'll reorder how I do the stretching etc. Like you, I find the deep stretching really relieves the (mild) pain, but maybe it's exacerbating things. And yes, I do have a bit of scar tissue on the tendon, so will try the massage. I think I'm going to have to give up the running, and substitute rowing or cycling (but both are very very boring for me ...) 

Sorry, Anna, should have started by saying thank you for this new thread! The other one was so long I think lots of good information had got lost.

And now I'm after some good information - I'm suffering from sore Achilles - I am getting back into running (well, jogging really) which in the long run makes me a much stronger dancer, but I've got really really sore Achilles tendons now. I do heel drops & rises on the edge of a stair (3 x 10 repetitions)  & calf stretches, anything else anyone can recommend? At the moment, tit's the transitions from flat to demi pointe, and pointing my foot that are difficult - that is, when the tendon needs to contract. Stretching it (plies, heel drops) are fine.

I've had a few sessions with a physiotherapist in the past over this - he says, just keep up with the heel drops & rises. And try to "dance without tension." 

Oh yes! My legs/torso are weird: I can do waist height extensions to the front quite easily, and ditto to the side - although I tend to lift my hip, but to the back I'm lucky to get anything decent above 45 degrees.

I have a fairly flexible back (for my age - I'm heading for 58) and strong core. If I really work on it, by doing that exercise with a tendu derriere, then a backbend, then bringing my leg up as my body goes back to upright, I can get a good line, and a leg just below hip height, but oh dear my arabesque in adage. 

Any other exercises that others have used which help?

When I've done rep classes & workshops, the teacher has always set his/her own version of the divertissements or corps choreography. There are numerous versions, and I am always really interested in the ways that different pieces are adapted. I remember in class years ago in Australia we were learning bits of Kitri - and we were using music scored by the great conductor John Lanchberry for the prima ballerina, Lucette Aldous. She is tiny, and so the piece that is Kitri's big entrance, and then a series of big jumps, was quite fast! Difficult for those of us with longer legs & taller bodies ...

But the point is that the facility for learning choreography was because of picking up combinations in class. I'm coming to see that it's an important skill, and adds greatly to my enjoyment of new classes - getting to grips with a new teacher's dance logic and way of moving his/her students. It all adds to the body knowledge!

Daughter of a friend is at The Place. It looks like a fantastic course: it has a high standard of contemporary technique, and then pushes the students to develop as independent dance artists. Laban is similar. My current ballet teacher trained at Northern Contemporary Dance - although she's mainly ballet trained. 

With those top conservatoires, you'll get a high standard of technique training, with what used to be called "contextual studies" (well, when I used to teach in a conservatoire programme as part of my job, that's what my stuff was called). 

Then you go to the university contemporary dance courses where the push on technique may not be quite so high, and there is more of the liberal arts/critical studies approach. Except that I see where I am now, and am taught by several very highly trained graduates of university contemporary Dance BA degrees.

The colleges/courses you  list in your post are all now part of the UCAS system I think? So it might be worth planning a series of trips to attend Open Days?  That's the way you can start to get a feel for the individual character of each course, its location, its facilities, the support for students, and the curriculum.

What others have said is accurate, in my knowledge/experience. I think the stipulation of a dance diploma for auditions etc is to weed out those who are clearly not going to be up to the standard required - to save them embarrassment, and the auditioners' time! It gives everyone an idea of where the benchmark for standards will be set.

There was a thread last year about university towns & cities which have good advanced/ adult ballet provision. I think it was tagged "adult ballet" so you could find it that way.

I have both the books Trog mentions, and they're excellent. Lots of drawings and photographs. This is the problem with online book buying - you can't riffle through to see whether the book is the right level and so on ...

There's also a good online ballet dictionary, from the ABT (American Ballet Theatre): 

http://www.abt.org/education/dictionary/

About the yawning thing: I yawn a lot - especially when I start non-normal (extra-daily) physical activity such as ballet - it's my body's way of getting more oxygen in!

Toi toi toi for your son and his auditions.

Many of the Dance degrees at universities (as opposed to Conservatoires which offer degrees) may not give enough training for a dance career at the very top of the profession. I tend only to know of the English situation. As far as I know the only thing near the mix your DD might like is Theatre Studies at Glasgow, where her dance background could be transferred to a broader sense of performance (eg physical theatre - think DV8 or Vincent Dance, or Frantic Assembly - all of these on English A Level syllabi, I think).

But it sounds as though she's more interested in musical theatre? LIPA, Mountview, might be the options there. At conservatoires such as Laban, The Place, or Northern [English!] Contemporary school, she may find the focus on contemporary dance quite different: it's not commercial dance, which a lot of teens think is "modern" or "contemporary" dance!

As an example - I've just started teaching a new module where I introduce a number of performance concepts via some pretty basic contemporary dance stuff based on release technique, Horton & graham (that just reflects the stuff I know & have learnt over the years - what's in my body!). It wasn't a dance class as such, but a way of getting them focused & centred & thinking about some performance principles for some text-based work. But I was very surprised that even those who said they had a dance background found the simple stuff quite unfamiliar - I think they had a background in commercial or jazz dance. Very different.

So, there may be QUITE a difference between advanced ie University level dance studies and what she's done in a private ballet school since a small child. Contemporary dance is far more linked to experimental theatre, live art, and performance art 

A possibility would be to look at performing arts university courses: Queen Margaret's in Edinburgh used to have an interesting one (at least when I did a QAA monitoring a decade ago!). Glasgow's is excellent, and has a strong - world-leading really - tradition of Live Art and Performance Art. Dance comes into this sort of performance work, but not in the way most teenaged jazz dancers might understand it! But a good Theatre Studies/Drama degree with a fair degree of focus on experimental or live art (Lancaster is another one - excellent programme) will allow a student with a dance background to use that dance training in exploring contemporary experimental performance more generally.

Surrey, Roehampton & Plymouth (and to a lesser extent, Falmouth) offer good all round dance degrees, again with a focus on contemporary and  ballet training (but not jazz/musical theatre as far as I know) although I wouldn't think they aim to turn out dancers working in companies such as Richard Alston, or Rambert etc. But a lot of graduates from these universities will find dance-related jobs - for example, have a look at the work of dancers in community-based Dance Agencies (not theatrical agencies which get performers work!), such as Ludus in Lancaster, DanceXchange in Birmingham, the fantastic agency in Newcastle: Dance City.  General useful information here:  http://www.onedanceuk.org/

One Dance UK (used to be DanceUK!)

Also, your DD might do an entirely unrelated course in a city where there is good private dance teaching. There are various threads in here on that, to help us all find good studios for adults.

Hope this helps!

I have some friends who are very very devoted yoga practicers. But while I like yoga, it doesn't give me what ballet does, because it doesn't move.

Beautiful music, that Tavener piece. I think one of the pluses of ballet over say, yoga or Pilates, is the music!

What Pas de Quatre says. People can get hung up on the exam syllabi, rather than the fact that good ballet training is good ballet training.

That said, what I've observed of the Vaganova syllabus (member of my family studied it in her pre-pro training) is what others have said: it's both simpler in terms of the exercise combinations/choreography, and far tougher and more exacting in that simplicity. You know the way that if you're at an advanced level, a beginner's class can be very very difficult because you're trying to do the basic stuff perfectly? That.

But we need to remember that the Vaganova system for example, was developed to train children from the age of 9/10 who have been selected for their bodies & basic physical facility for ballet. And students are still selected this way. I think the nearest to this in the UK is the RBS. And they don't follow an exam board curriculum either!

You could all go to adult ballet class and join us on the adult ballet thread

Exactly! I was going to suggest this. Great minds ...