Nicola H

well it is a fondue !

presentation and identification are not necessarily the same ! i know some very femme women who are complete tomboys in what they do and where their interests lay but in every day life and their demeanour and choice of clothing for 'normal' situations they are very femme , equally i know some very butch presenting women and some 'normal' men that are completely into very stereotypically femme activities ...

tendus to a version of Dolly P's 9 to 5 ... ( another one becasue the ' adult beginners' aren;t quite so beginnerish any more )

or look at the amount of calories in a 24 hr ration pack ( about 4000 iirc) or what they shovel down the young lads at Lympstone ... there have been comments from others about their offspring descending like a plague of locusts after dance ... if your BMI is 15 and there is no , good , underlying reason for it to be that low , a good ballanced diet with peltny of energy and calorie dense stuff in it will do no harm at all .... a 'healthy ' BMI is 20 -25 and while many sources state 25- 30 as overweight it does depend on habitus and lean mass / body fat content.

I'm guessing that aren't a native english speaker. are you a beginner or do you have training from elsehwere ? You are not going to earn a living from amateur companies , amateur being the key word here , as best it's money cost neutral and the cost is your time. In the past i've done amateur MT and G+S stuff and realistically it was cost neutral to slightly costing me money to do so. Unfortunately the requirements of classical ballet are such that unless you have the physical potential AND it has been identified and trained before the completion of puberty you will not meet the standards required of the professional companies , there aretiny numberso f execpetions to this , but even then it;s case of them starting serious training at 16 - 18 rather than as a child

Taking the thread back to the original question, it is extremely unlikely that someone starting at 23 is going to have a professional career as a performer in classical ballet. The boat has been missed , the debate is how far and that assumes that the individual has the underpinning characteristics and potential io nthe first place. As we saw i nthe MCC/ boys thread there is a question aobut is ' the system' and the orthodoxy so focused on the traditional route to professional performing , that the wider world of Dance is missing out ; if you look at the theatrical world there are innumerable amateur companies doing MT , G+S ( as the G+S snobs will insist it;s 'light opera' ), 'proper' Opera and Panto ... most decent sized town have at least one or two of such companies ...

do you feel lucky Petal ? well do you ?

part of the reason IF/ Elementary (depending on awarding body) and subsequent awards have a minimum age limit is exactly that, every reliable source you read says 11-12 for pointe due to ossification of the foot bones ( little ones and even tweens still have a mainly cartiligenous foot due to the amount of gorwing the foot does between toddling and puberty ... even the graded syallbuses keep certain things 'back' because of either cognitive or physical development issues ...

However some of the attitudes displayed ... also the sideways looks from some of the 'once a week' parents etc...

which means the y7/8 entry to vocational training for boys is probably less critical ... i was a weedy thing in y 7/8 and towards the middlw of y 8 things just happened ( near halved my times in middle distance/ 'cross country' running etc ). the two critical things from this whole thread are 1. societal and organisational attitudes matter with regard to adults schoosing to work in a field ( and if men has said some of the stuff about females in STEM / Military / 999 services that females have said about men in EYFS/ teaching in general / healthcare , the chaps would have been crucified ) 2. it seems a lot of the challenges in getting boys into Dance are the 'made up by others' ones ... whether societal in general or specific to the dance community...

it;s the number's game again , as lower levels it;s the case of beign glad of those who can make it across those two tiny strips of metal that are insignificant physically but psychologically huge ...

any proof the quality line is lower ? ofr just the numbers game meaning if a male reaches the quality ine they are likely to get the whatever, where the number of females meeting the quality line exceeds the availability ... ?

In terms of early years especially i'm unsure where you get the impression it's part time and/ or term time only, arguably demand increases outside term time...

Because of attitudes such as those displayed by Kate N claiming that men commit more abuse seeming ily without regard to the ONS figures that bangorballetboy quoted. I'm, sorry if it appears i'm digging at Kate N here , but the figures say what they say and the assertion she makes is not borne out.

Exactly, there is a tendancy to focus on sexual abuse in such discussions but that suits the Millie Tant 2nd wave ' all men are rapists' line . If you take the UK definition of Rape it is impossible for someone without a Penis to be a rapist ... but the statement ' all rapists are men ' is not commutative ... Kate's comments are exactly the issues and mindset that create the issues we are discussing , the risk of stranger and/or not in the home abuse are lower, yet all the 'paedo-panic' is about this ... for those with long memeories the Brass Eye Paedopanic episode summed up a lot of the media driven hysteria. structural discrimination is the assumption that males performing 'initimate procedures' ( whether that is healthcare or personal care or whatever - and physicla corrections / costume fitting can border on this ) must be chaperoned but it;s ok for females to do it unsupervised / unchaperoned.

you seem to be confusing the elite performance aspects with the day to day reality of the hobbyist participant / 'journeyman' teacher ... take a typical evening / saturday morning at a 'normal' dance school ... what;s the percentage of boys / men who come through the door i nthe first place and how many of them are none particpanting brothers / dads etc ... my point about pointe is the credibility of the teacher as performer , which is something which is common thread across all training settings, while i am very much a novice i nthe world of ballet, i've been teaching , assessing or QAing others teaching for aobut 20 years ... and a common theme is that a someone who has a suitable level of credibility in perfotmance is or is percieved ( by some quantitive measures for 'is ' and by qualitative methods foer the perception stuff ) to be a better teacher than someone wit hthe same teaching qualification but a lesser levle of practical experience ... a firend of mine who is currently none practising ( and not on the live register) Paramedic recently had to attend a First Aid at Work course for his current job which was taught by one of the big training providers ( the one with a colour and a shape ) and the trainer deliverign that course had little or no practical experience of first aid or ambulance work to the point that at the end of the first day my firend took the trainer aside and 'outed' himself and his background becasue what she was teaching was well off beam .

Teaching what age group? And working in every LEA and for every GM school or academy as well... And of course working in youth services and all the uniformed youth organisations as well ?

You will find a lot of these polices have been rewritten in the light of the equality act and a more intersectional approach to safeguarding etc rather than the paedopanic era.

debit / credit cards is fine if you have contactless and are heappy to get them out of your pocket / purse / wallet each time ... a word of caution - ' visitor' oyster cards can;t be registered on the oyster portal so rely on beign topped up at ticket machines / places who can do top ups , where a standard oyster can be registered and top-up through the webportal ( and if the card is lost the any credit isn;t )

'enables a head teacher to grant ' does not mean that permission must be given , only clarifies that approval from on high ( LEA and/or governing body) is not required.

which is the same approach as we have seen in STEM with the use of females in STEM jobs as role models and 'poster girls' for females in STEM. the biggest boundary to boys / men dancing is a small strip of metal or two... the threshold to the building and the threshold to the studio ...

It's a long time ago , but in my youth I sailed reasonably competitively and the RYA region organised a coaching week each summer , which depending o nthe exact holiday dates of the various schools / counties in the region was in term time for half ( or more) of the participants ... the fact the course was run by the governing body and had the attendance of one of the National Coaches - often he'd fly back from the Youth worlds as it finished on the Friday and appear mid morning on the Monday morning having been to RYA HQ to collect his car and coaching boat ... I think the issue in the current environment is people not wanting to take the decision and a culture within the schools that zero tolerance makes it easier to refuse the requests that are purely hoildays , rather than for coaching or competitng / performing ... attitudes of the SMT/SLT / whaterver buzzword is used to refer to the head , deputy(s) and assistant heads in the school will also play a part.

Attendance will be the issue i'm quite sure , leading to people ( form tutor, head of year, assistant head) not wanting to make the decision , and it's possibly going to end up going to the de facto if not the titular Headteacher ... ( i make that distinction becuase at both the scool i attended 11-16 and for sixth form the actual Head did very little operational or tactical management and was entirely strategic , where as the deputies had the operational and tactical focus )

I suppose some of it will depend on the licensing stuff , in terms of MT i know the licencing people keep a good grip on it ( and in the past where schools or Ad Dram had booked a piece several years in advance and then a pro company decides to do it, restrictions on advertising etc have been placed on the school / am dram groups - I think a few places go caught out before the mid 90s revival of Grease i nthe west end )

wait until the first ill founded complaint and the 'no smoke without fire ' gossip ... remember the great british public in mobs is known for hounding paediatricians from their homes ... another thing to consider is the structural discrimination that has been encouraged by the second wave feminists in social work and education policy ... such as differential supervision supervision requirements based on the gender of the adults ... e.g. requiring mixed gender groups of YP be suprvised by a team that includes at least one female ( but not the converse ) despite the fact that women are just as capable of being abusers ...