Ballet advice please, any experts?

[micah]

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!

Yep, those are the others I want to avoid, the show dance/acro type thing. They were very common where I grew up, and I just don't like the make up/outfit/ over confidence in tiny kids.

My dd's are the hyperactive, don't engage brain before leaping type- ballet will hopefully slow them down and teach control :)

I don't know of any 'comp schools' locally, tbh.

I aso didn't mean to suggest using 'overall success in festivals' as a filter - because that success could be in street, latin etc rather than in ballet. It is 'who wins the ballet championship' and 'which schools tend to win in the different classical / ballet group classses' that might help you to identify who takes their ballet seriously. I would also say that 'weekly classes in all levels all the way up to Intermediate / Advanced ballet' in the timetable would be a decent indicator. Many of the 'less serious' schools might have liots of 'baby ballet' or even grades 1 and 2 classes, but may well not have a full programme for the higher grades. I did some Goiogling and found e.g. a school that just had 'Ballet - all levels' fior a single hour in its weekly timetable, although having a very professional websuite, own premises etc.

If you can find a school offering several classes at Inter Foundation and above a week, then it's likely to be a good school. If there's more than one class a week at Advanced 2, then it's a very good one!

1. Ask the Royal Ballet School Junior Associates programme which schools/teachers have students with them. 2) Ask the Royal Academy of Dancing which of their accredited teachers send students for exams. (There are many accredited, but not all will necessarily go on to send pupils for exams). You could try asking Cecchetti Society, ISTD and BBO the same question too but from what I can see RAD has the largest number of students who go on to dance professionally in major companies. 3) A more laborious but occasionally helpful method is to look at the websites of the UK dance companies to see which of their dancers come from your city (you say it's a fairly large one) and which teacher they trained with. 4)If you are near White Lodge, Elmhurst, English National Ballet School, Arts Educational or Central School of Ballet, you could ask them which teachers/schools some of their students from your area came from. (It's not unusual for London-based White Lodge or ENB School to get students from the north or Scotland) If they have many, I don't see that they would have a conflict of interest/feel it's unfair to other teachers in disclosing it; they understand that when students are keen they wish to learn from a good teacher. Some might be too busy to answer the query but eventually someone will!