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Royal Ballet Teacher Training Course or Dip RBS (TTC)


lollylamb1

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I'm aware that this stopped running in 2000, however I was wondering if anyone could explain a bit more about it. I know a fair few people who are graduates of the course and attended the Royal Ballet School themselves.

 

Were there 2 courses - one for those destined to be professional dancers and one for teachers, was it only open to students of the lower and or upper schools or a separate entity? How long did the course run and why did it stop?

 

 

 

 

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From reading adverts in old copies of the Dancing Times I seem to remember it was for 16 year olds and entry was open to everyone via an audition and academic suitability.But you still needed to have had a considerable amount of classical ballet training yourself,I think. I often wondered why the Teacher Training Course stopped too.

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  • 2 weeks later...

Hello. I am an ex grad of the course. The preliminary audition was the same one for both courses. We had a seperate final after the dancers course final. This entailed extra assessments, music awareness amongst others. There were a lot of us unsuccessful dancers course finalists who did the teachers course final,as I was aware at the time I was one of the only applicants who applied to both courses as I knew I wanted to teach. I couldn't be happier with how fate worked out.

 

Originally called the Craftsmans course; Dame Ninette de Valois set it up in the 60's with Valerie Adams, my teacher, who was a member of the company at the time.

 

We shared all the teachers with the dancers course for many subjects. My personal perks were that I got to attend some dancers course classes as I had completed a lot of my exams prior to going so I had the Russian teachers on occasion too. On the teachers course we also regularly had Pamela May and Maria Fay amongst others. My main teachers were Miss Adams, Hope Keelan now Dep Ballet Principal at WL, Jackie Barrett who went on to be grad girls teacher on the dancers course, Julie Lincoln and Patricia Linton. Also Denise Winmill and Valerie Sunderland. So as I saw it we got to have our cake and eat it!!

 

Our training is unmatched, the heritage and essence of Royal Ballet style poured into our training over the 3 years is not something you can teach to today's graduating teachers from other establishments. We were required to have gained our RAD and Cecchetti Advanced exams to graduate and due to my smaller height I got to do a couple of walk on roles that I was understudying with the company so we had to be able to dance.

 

We were assessed annually and in my first year three girls were assessed out. Two were put on a 6 week probationary period to 'buck their ideas up'! Originally one of 15, 11 of us graduated. Dame Ninette de Valois handed us our Diploma.

 

We had longer days than the dancers course as we had the same classes plus extra. We were trained separately from the dancers course in our main classes, Rep, Solos,Character Contemporary and Pointe but other classes were done with the dancers course.

 

We were watched regularly by Merle Park and Monica Mason.

 

Miss Adams unfortunately decided to retire and the course was handed over to someone who had a very different vision. I had graduated but as we understand it She became ill and so after 18 months,Miss Adams returned to finish the course off with the last graduates. Gailene Stock had started by then and she did not want the teachers course running in its current format so it finished, a real shame but it wasn't right without Miss Adams at the helm, though Miss Keelan held it together well, she got nabbed for WL. Mark Annear is now working hard to continue the ex professional dancers teaching course.

 

Hope this answers your question a bit :)

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I was having a look through the RBS website a couple of days ago and I believe the course is open again. In fact I think there are two, one for ex pro ballet dancers and another geared towards teaching dance in the community (I didn't read it thoroughly, but that's my impression) x

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Thank you, Balletqs, what a fascinating insight. I believe my DD's lovely local ballet teacher (as opposed to her Associates Teachers) took this course in the same format as you. It sounds as if it was a wonderful course.

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