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Extra-curricular activities

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Original poster

Ballet advice please, any experts?

29 replies

micah · 12/09/2014 12:38

DD, age 6, has expressed an interest in "proper ballet". She has been doing ballet in school, but it's not enough for her.

Now I did ballet as a child, and by sheer accident ended up with an ex-royal ballet teacher. I think we did BBO exams- we had little theory booklets and had to recite them as part of the exam.

Because of this I haven't been happy with the couple of ballet schools we tried with older DD, or I've seen/heard about. Many these days seem to be "theatre schools" and do combined ballet/dance/tap. Or they're waft round in a little pink leotard in a church hall.

So I'm looking for a ballet class which teaches proper technique. Which syllabus should I be looking at? I can't find BBO, only IDTA/RAD/ISTD. Where to I start looking? I'm in a fairly big city, so how do I find the good places out of the hundreds?

Thanks!

OP posts:
Original poster
micah · 12/09/2014 21:56

Thanks!

I know many teach all different styles, and that's a good thing! The places near here though do "dance" classes, rather than specific ballet, you can't choose to do ballet only. Most are Saturday morning (babysitting ;) ), so you drop your child for a couple of hours and they do 30 mins tap, ballet, then modern. Leave them all morning and they do a bit of singing and acting too!

If we get down the line a bit and she wants to explore other styles, great. But I'd like to just start off by learning ballet properly first.

OP posts:
lecherrs · 12/09/2014 21:29

I'm no expert, but I think things may have moved on from your day, and you can certainly find a teacher that teaches proper technique with RAD or ISTD. Certainly, my daughter's old ballet school was ISTD and they managed to get girls in to the Royal Ballet, Tring and Elmhurst (mixture of associate and full time places). My DD is at a different school now (still ISTD) and a number of past dancers have gone on to professional dance schools and joined professional dance companies.

Both dance schools teach the works - ballet, tap, modern, jazz....

They're still good dance schools though!

Original poster
micah · 12/09/2014 20:09

Thanks, will take a look :)

OP posts:
taxi4ballet · 12/09/2014 19:27

Hi, you might like to look at balletcoforum, huge amount of useful information on there, plus loads of parents, teachers and pro dancers who will be able to help.