How can a 12yo “catch up” with dancing?

[StuntNun]

My DS has recently decided he wants to go into musical theatre as a career. However, he never did any dancing until recently so he’s miles behind his peers, some of whom have been dancing for years. I signed him up for a dance class but he was put in with other children the same age with more experience and he just wasn’t able to keep up or learn in that environment so I stopped the class as he wasn’t progressing. He has a great memory for routines and has no trouble learning the moves but he doesn’t execute them well. He doesn’t seem to have any body awareness and can’t tell that he’s not doing the moves correctly. I looked at dance summer schools but I think he would be really out of place at his current level of dancing. He really needs to start from the beginning with a teacher that will give him feedback on where he needs to improve; he just didn’t get that from being in a class with girls who had already had lessons for years. Please can anyone give me suggestions for how he can go back to basics and properly get started with dancing?

@Autumn38 and @LittleLabrador many traditional dance schools offer ballet, tap and modern, and if people are interested in musical theatre, then it is usual to do all three of those. A lot of dance schools do jazz as well now, but it helps to have already done some ballet and modern before starting that.

Contemporary dance is not worth bothering with until dancers have some physical maturity, and strong core strength backed up with solid ballet technique.

Ballet-trained posture & control is at the foundation of all of it really (unless someone is just interested in doing tap and nothing else), and a lot of dance schools won't let you do modern or jazz unless you do ballet too.

18+ full-time MT colleges have ballet as part of their audition process.