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rowan

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Everything posted by rowan

  1. Tring has by far the lowest number of pupils on MDS, according the Department of Education's guide to the MDS (published 2013) with only 17% of pupils on the scheme. The RBS has 83%, Elmhurst has 80% and Hammond 60%. It's the lowest out of all the specialist dance and music schools. http://www.isc.co.uk/Resources/Independent%20Schools%20Council/Documents/Find%20a%20School/access-to-excellence-the-dfes-m-and-d-schools.pdf
  2. I've found out an answer to my own query about single-sex boys' schools and GCSE Dance - Tiffin Boys' Grammar (which I think is one of the country's top grammar schools) not only offers GCSE Dance, but dance is also compulsory throughout years 7, 8 and 9. Good on them!
  3. What is offered at different schools for GCSE options can vary tremendously. Has GCSE Dance ever been an option at single-sex boys' schools, I wonder...
  4. For those going through Year 11 now with their dancing children, you have my sympathy! We're right in the middle of it again with one of my non-dancing, less academic, children, which brings its own pressures...
  5. Our GCSE experience… DD did GCSE Art. It was compulsory at her school to take one practical/creative subject at GCSE. Even though she had already taken GCSE Music in Year 8/9, she HAD to then pick another one for her Year 10/11 options. Art was a HUGE amount of work, more than any other subject. It involved her sometimes having to go into school at half term and some Saturdays to get the coursework finished. For weeks the kitchen was full of pastels and paint and glue and latex, and seemed to involve us running round at the last minute when she realised she run out of this or that – usually something specialist that could only be found at an art shop that was closed… We were all thoroughly sick of Art by the end of it! Her school would make students who were falling behind in core subjects drop GCSE Art if they were taking it. By the end of Year 11 the class was down to half the initial intake… She had opted not to take some GCSEs that were on offer as twilight subjects, including Dance, because she thought that it would take up too much time and interfere with her dance classes. Her school was supportive of her dance whilst not being particularly interested. If she needed time off for a dance-related activity, we would just write and say. We kept it to an absolute minimum and the school never objected. DD went to a large inner city comprehensive and I think if pupils were doing well at school and didn’t cause any trouble, the school was happy for students to have a serious focus on something outside of school. They had enough pupils with other issues that they had to deal with! I’ve been quite shocked reading some stories on the forum about schools refusing permission for this and that. Her dance school had written to her school in about Year 8 explaining about her dance ability. Maybe that helped. DD managed 8 A* and 5 As while doing about 25+ hours of dance a week, six days a week, which was better than I dared hoped for, as she had really lost focus on GCSEs by the end – they do seem to drag on and on for ever. She tried hard not to miss any dance classes during the middle of GCSE time but did in the end miss about three or four when she thought she had better revise instead. As for GCSE Art, her Art teacher at school had actually been at vocational ballet school, one of the big ones, as a young person. She never ended up dancing professionally, and of course, even if she had done, as we all know, dance careers don’t last for ever and people need to find other talents (hopefully) and have other careers!
  6. I think the style is the normal Bloch bootie one, just new colours.
  7. If you click the Notifications symbol, the dropdown doesn't appear properly. It looks like it's about to, but starts buffering and then shrinks to a thinnish white box with nothing in it - no View All Notifications or anything. I tried again on my computer at work today and it was the same there.
  8. I have that, too, Dance*is*life, just recently. It makes no difference which browser I open up with either.
  9. I think it might depend on where you live as to whether or not you think it's niche or not. I'm in an ethnically very diverse area, and South Asian dance doesn't seem particularly niche to me, certainly no more than hip hop, which might be one of the more common dance forms performed by youngsters. In fact, DD's first dance experience as a small child at nursery was being taken to a South Asian dance workshop! Even the Royal Opera House next month are showing the South Asian dance-trained choreographer Shobana Jeyasingh's version of Bayadere.
  10. rowan

    No! Help????

    I'm afraid you don't know if she ticks enough boxes. We as parents all wish we knew these things.The best person to judge will be her teacher or her JA teacher. And even they don't have a crystal ball and don't really know either. And you don't need to get her through it with the same passion she had before - that's up to her. If she has the passion, if she has "enough" to keep going through it again and again, that's all that's needed at this stage. If her passion fades at some point, or she doesn't want to continue, that's fine, too. Be guided by what she wants - bearing in mind that in her teenage years, what she wants may be totally different!
  11. Perhaps I'm in a minority, but I've got no objections to "adverts" like this at all, as long as the advert isn't repeated ad nauseum across the board. It helps gets a message out in the public domain to members about services, courses, workshops, productions, etc, that they might find useful.
  12. Is this version the same as the Christopher Wheeldon version performed by Joffrey Ballet? I assume so. In which case, the woman in black shorts is performing the Russian dance - you can tell by the headdress. There's a review of it here: http://www.pointemagazine.com/issues/februarymarch-2015/studio-stage
  13. Also possibly of interest, the Guardian published a story about the RBS's outreach programme Primary Steps yesterday: http://www.theguardian.com/stage/2015/feb/13/royal-ballet-school-primary-steps-dagenham
  14. Oh, dear. I couldn't really see the Act 1 girls group dancing because of "leaners" in front of me! The usher made them sit back after the first interval.
  15. Already? Ballet West isn't a company, it's a school - though its students do tour and perform. That's why it's on their Facebook page, I assume - their student must now have been offered a contract somewhere. Congrats to her.
  16. I saw the same performance and I thought Iziar Mendizabal had just the right amount of adolescent awkwardness in the early scenes. But I thought Beatriz Stix-Brunel's Ogla was too childlike. Even if she is meant to be a slightly silly and flirtatious girl, I found it hard to believe she was engaged to be married. For me, one of the highlights was the vastly improved corps, which had been distinctly lacklustre in the Don Q I saw.They seemed like a completely revitalised company, and all for the better!
  17. What do people think about the rights and wrongs of videoing the classes? Although I would have loved to have seen more of the classes and workshops and the classical coaching, should we, as general members of the public over the entire world, have been able to see them? I know everything's all over the internet these days and it seems quite normal for young people to upload videos of themselves all the time. The performance videos are perhaps another matter. In a normal ballet class, you can't just turn up as an outsider and watch the class - or only in certain circumstances. Are these videos going to be on the internet for ever? Probably. Everyone will have signed their permission for videoing - perhaps they all welcomed it - it would increase their exposure and perhaps other potential employers who were not at the competition would see them, and make job offers, etc. Maybe I'm just old-fashioned!
  18. On the subject of other competitors, I thought Julian MacKay was outstanding and, in fact, I thought he would win overall. Harrison Lee was truly fab, as well. Of the surprise non-finalists, Miko Fogarty... I thought she was pretty flawless and was surprised she didn't get through. I suppose she was in the older age group this time around, though. Of the way the live streaming was done, I actually liked the interviews with the judges and their watching of their own youthful endeavours at the competition, which many of them obviously didn't think much of! It just brought it home that the competitors are still student dancers, and they are going to get even better as their careers develop.
  19. However, as he's already engaged in the Vaganova training method, and if he feels he needs another year or so of training, it might be best to continue in that method of training and not switch at this late stage. I've got no idea what other methods the other schools use - it could be a reason why the RBS didn't want him - not because they didn't, but to take him on for a year at a late stage of a different training methodology would be counterproductive. Though I suspect a final year of training is really about fine-tuning things. I've got no idea, of course. Just a thought. I'm sure he'll make the right decision for him. Patricia Zhou left the Kirov Academy for the RB, but she entered the company (not the school) as an apprentice for a year as a Lausanne prizewinner and had her pick of apprenticeships. She's now in the corps of Staatsballett Berlin.
  20. Interesting, Aileen - the Sergei Polunin Wikipedia page says he won both the gold and the audience award at the 2006 Prix de Lausanne.
  21. And I think I remember you saying he was turned down for JAs - now there's a life lesson that epitomises the saying "many a road to Rome"!
  22. Wikipedia says that Chengwu Guo won that year, now a principal with The Australian Ballet.
  23. I think Vmmom isn't referring to the US ones, but to this one, which takes place at the Bolshoi Academy in Moscow. I hadn't heard of it, and it looks like it was new last year. http://www.russianballetinternational.com
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