Colman

Do make it clear that the odds of getting in are small - if nothing else, there's a lot of equally good people going for it and there are only so many places. It's down to luck for the people who are in the "maybe" group, which is probably most of them. Children can suprise you. Our eldest son - now ten - is emotionally soft in a lot of ways but has a core of steel when it comes to audition rejections. He'll get a refusal letter and he's all "Right, try again next year." Anyway, if she wants to be part of the dance world learning to deal with rejection is a core skill!

I'd say do the work - do the strength exercises, do the ankle rises, strengthen the feet and ankles as much as you can - and see what happens. That's my plan: part of the reason (or at the part of the excuse for) that I took up ballet was to help with a chronic ankle injury. Our teacher wants us to do poses passe for our end of show dance and it turns out that they're either going to cripple me for life or give my ankles superpowers. Not sure which yet. I have every intention of doing some pointe work with the ladies (I'm 110kg of 47 year old man!) if and when they go up on pointe if I can get strong and stable enough. But even if I can't, having stronger feet and ankles is going to help protect me against further injury. You'll either have stronger ankles or you'll have stronger ankles and be able to go up on pointe. Win-win. Just don't be macho, don't rush and don't move faster than your body lets you. You've ages to get it right, so take your time. (Incidentially, those pictures look to my inexpert eyes like you have too much weight in the small toes and not enough on the middle of the ball of the foot.) I try to do sets of 16 and that's no fun.

I don't think they know until the attendance list stabilises. My wife did one where the rep being taught changed because the one boy they had booked dropped out. I suspect I'm not as picky about what rep I do as you are so it doesn't really bother me. Though I'm in not hurry for another stint in the Lilac Fairy's attendants. The workshop was good, but I fear that the Czardas that we did will turn up on my work-out playlist and I'll end up having flashbacks. I think they're fairly constrained in how they use the facilities there. We generally end up eating in the seating area in reception these days. I got there early and was doing a bit of tai chi in the (empty) foyer to warm up a bit and shake out the flight stiffness and I'm pretty sure I overheard a slightly anxious conversation along the lines of "we can ask him to stop if you like" when a member of the school staff came by. (He was entirely unconcerned, and I don't think had said anything to them.)

I believe that’s been done before but it fell by the wayside.

Not to mention that those emails are all basically an admission that they didn't have proper consent already, so they shouldn't have been sending you mail in the first place.

Tonight’s celebratory drink is in the airport on the way back from the RAD Coppelia workshop in Elmhurst.

I’ve always skipped the socks for ISTD, though I do wear white shoes for exams. The ladies generally wear short skirts for exams too.

Eventually. The ISTD admin in Ireland is capricious at best.

Grade 2 ISTD done today. Nobody died, so all went reasonably well. 😂 Now to talk my teacher into Grade 3 in November so I can catch up with my wife.

Flamingo Lake! They'd be foolish to let any details out, since they're pretty much guaranteed that people will jump on them to explain what a disaster the whole thing is going to be. Who wants that to be the news stories coming up to the opening?

No one produces Vitamin D as far north as the UK or IE during the winter, so if your diet isn't pretty high in it there's a good chance you'll be deficient even if you're outside all day - I suspect without evidence that growing and training kids use it up faster. If you're darker skinned there's a good chance you'll be deficient anyway, so I think the advice these days is that supplementing (or eating a lot of oily fish) is probably a good idea. We tend to take supplements during the winter somewhat haphazardly.

Thats strategic incompetence as an art form! Personally very glad that both our young dancers are boys and my wife can do her own bun!

I’ve spent the last year moving my weight placement forward in ballet and martial arts. It’s fun after a lifetime of letting it fall too far back.

I must say that the gap-between-the-heels approach seems counterintuitive to me: I’ve managed to injure myself a couple of times by (stupidly, tiredly) loading a hyperextended leg on landing, putting too much load on the front of the knee. Training dancers to do that rather than accepting some excessive bend in the leg until they’re strong enough and develop their proprioception sufficiently to hold the leg straight seems like asking for trouble.

Viv’s advice is the same as our teacher gives us - whole family are hyperextended to a greater or lesser degree - and I think reflects current best practice.

Oh dear. I’m afraid anything that mentions western physics and eastern mysticism in one breath makes me twitch.

Yeah, but that has very little to do with her technique.

The attitude to school attendance in the U.K. looks utterly demented from outside. As to a perfect attendance record being a matter of pride … that’s just encouraging kids to come to school sick, spreading illness and doing them no good at all.

Our teacher tends to use centre barre some of the time and barre barre some of the time, depending on what she's focusing on, for roughly the reasons outlined by Dr Dance above. Syllabus classes will normally do barre, though if we're concentrating on learning dances we may skip it. Part of the problem is hour class blocks, which is constrained by the blocks rooms can be booked in. Because it's always been done that way. It could be worse: I'm still seeing martial arts classes doing hard stretching at the beginning of class before any warmup and almost certainly increasing the risk of damage. Change is slow, especially when CPD isn't required.

More citations needed, I fear.

Lucky Elmhurst cancelled: what would have been my flight was diverted to Manchester!

Elmhurst is closed Sunday, so that solves my travel problem.

Elmhurst closed Sunday, all classes cancelled, so no Adult classes or rep. Have to hope my flight is cancelled so I get a refund!

First advice: talk to your teacher. This is almost always the first advice. Second, I assume you have loads of downtime in rehearsals. Use some of it to practice? Third, performance experience is always useful.