abt – Page 2

Dance Blog Spotlight: Swan Lake Samba Girl

August 17, 2012 by 4dancers

Today I’m excited to introduce Tonya Plank, author of one of the early dance blogs on the web (Swan Lake Samba Girl). I can remember reading it years ago, and it’s every bit as good today as it was then. Say hello to one of the early adopters, and see where her journey has taken her…

1. Can you tell readers a bit about your background in dance?

As a child, I took ballet, tap dance, jazz, and acrobatics, concentrating the longest on ballet. But I gave that up once I went to college. I was just too busy. As an adult, I took up ballroom dancing – mainly to alleviate stress from my day job, as a lawyer. I ended up loving it so much, I started competing at the amateur level. That rekindled my childhood passion for ballet, and I started going to a lot of ballet performances in New York, where I lived for many years, before moving to L.A.

2. When did you begin your blog-and why did you start it?

I started my dance blog in mid-2006. I was competing in ballroom dance competitions and I’d just gone to Blackpool – the mother of all ballroom dancing comps. I started my blog to document my journey as a dancer – really, to capture the trials and tribulations of learning to dance and compete in dance as an adult. Later, I got very busy and ballroom dancing became expensive and I stopped competing so much. But then I started going to the ballet, and to other kinds of concert dance performances in NYC and my blog kind of grew into a blog about watching dance. Soon, I had a loyal following of other dance-goers, other ballet lovers.

3. What does your blog cover?

My blog now covers mainly ballet and modern dance performances.

I’ve moved to Los Angeles, so I write mainly about what’s going on in dance in Southern California. I also try to write about the TV dance shows as often as I can. I especially like to cover the new ones – like “Breaking Pointe” on CW, and now “A Chance to Dance,” which will premiere on Ovation TV in August. I also try to keep up with the ballroom dancing competitions as much as I can.

4. What has been the best part about participating in the dance community online? [Read more…]

ABT National Training Curriculum — Teacher Training, Part I

July 25, 2012 by 4dancers

4dancers has been following along with Dalia Rawson from Ballet San Jose as the school participates in American Ballet Theatre’s National Training Curriculum program. Today and tomorrow we’ll feature posts that reflect on the day-to-day experience of the teacher training portion…

(You can find the very first post in this series here if you’d like a little more background.)

Ballet SJ School Students with Franco De Vita, happy after an inspiring demonstration class

by Dalia Rawson

Tuesday, May 29, 9:37PM: The Day Before

Tomorrow is the day. Teacher training at Ballet San Jose School for certification in the American Ballet Theatre National Training Curriculum finally will begin. Fifty-two people – about half dancers, faculty, and staff from Ballet San Jose, and half from the Bay Area, out of state, and even as far away as Japan – have signed up to take the first of three training courses necessary to become certified in all levels of the ABT National Training Curriculum. This course covers the Primary Classes and Levels 1, 2 and 3 of the Curriculum, and I can’t wait to get started, not only to learn the material, but to learn more about how the implementation of the Curriculum will benefit our student body.

I look forward to welcoming people early tomorrow morning into the 1920’s era building that is home to the Ballet SJ Studios here in downtown San Jose. I think we are ready. We have studios and pianists scheduled, and twenty student demonstrators confirmed, five for each of four days of demonstration classes. Franco De Vita, Raymond Lukens and Meaghan Love arrived earlier today from New York, and we showed them around the Ballet SJ Studios. It seemed we had everything they needed, and it looks as if we’re all ready to go!

I’m so excited that the training session is about to begin, and am finding it hard to calm down and get ready to bed. One final very girly question remains to be answered tonight: what on earth am I going to wear tomorrow?

Thursday, May 31, 9:23PM: After Day One

What a day! So many excited instructors arrived, filling our hallways and lobby as they registered. We each received an enormous binder with the curriculum guidelines, illustrated glossaries, and sections on health and development. After welcoming us to the program, Raymond introduced himself and Franco, and then began a detailed discussion about the motivation behind creating a National Training Curriculum. It seems that the administration of American Ballet Theatre had scheduled a retreat to deal with the issue of dancers who were so stylistically specific that it became problematic. This was not only an artistic issue for the dancers who had trouble adapting to various choreographers, but became a physical liability, as learning new movement vocabularies was so foreign to these dancers that it was leading to injuries. Additionally, dancer health issues, such as younger and younger dancers developing serious injuries, and the dangers of over stretching were discussed. The idea was put forth that a National Training Curriculum should be developed, not only to benefit the 5% of people who have the natural potential to become professional ballet dancers, and to help them to safely develop solid technique and artistry, but to create a broader base of love, support and understanding of the art form, through healthy, safe, and appropriate training for people with all ranges of natural ability.

We dove right into the National Training Curriculum’s ten principles of classical ballet training, which broke down the concepts that ballet teachers need to be able to explain and pass on to their students into easy to understand and comprehensive categories, defining fundamental but sometimes vague terms such as “placement,” “posture,” and “turnout” clearly and specifically. Ballet terminology was addressed, and the need for a standard naming of steps was explained. Considering the international nature ballet training, and the wide range of names for each step that are in common use, it is easy to appreciate the need for standardized glossary. [Read more…]

A Studio Director’s Change Of Heart: Why Ballet Exams Work

June 7, 2012 by 4dancers

by Risa Gary Kaplowitz

I would have never thought that I would one day espouse the idea of examinations for the ballet students at my school. Certainly the studio in which I grew up, Maryland Youth Ballet, has produced dozens of professional dancers, and they never presented their students for exams. And weren’t the students at my own studio thriving and going on to pursue their own careers without ever having taken an exam?

I am far from the only studio director to have disregarded exams. Even as ballet exams are relatively common in Europe, especially at the world’s major ballet schools with their own training systems in Russia (Vaganova), France (Paris Opera Ballet), Italy (Cecchetti), England (Royal Academy of Dance, also known as RAD), and Denmark (Royal Danish Ballet), most American ballet schools, which generally offer a potpourri of the above curriculums, do not offer graded evaluations to their students.

An example of a typical American ballet teacher’s reaction to exams can be found in my thoughts several years ago, when I witnessed Paris Opera Ballet School students prepare for their exams (a perk of being a former famous ballerina’s business partner at the time). The students were going from one combination to another, which they had memorized.

At the time, my thoughts were thus: Didn’t we American ballet instructors need to keep our impatient students happy and their aversion to boredom at bay? And didn’t American ballet students need more diversity in their ballet classes than simple preparation for an exam in order to be prepared for an American ballet company where they could be dancing a Petipa variation one minute and a Nacho Duato piece the next?

This video shows young Vaganova Ballet Academy students’ incredible clarity. Surely this type of regimented single-curriculum training system couldn’t be possible in an American studio with varying body types and skill levels.

Or could it?

Enter American Ballet Theatre’s National Training Curriculum, which offered it’s inaugural training sessions to ABT alumni dancers in 2007. For the simple reason that ABT was my favorite company, I was curious enough to start to nibble on the ballet curriculum bullet. However, I never gave serious thought to presenting my students for exams, which were an optional part of the ABT training system. [Read more…]

10 Questions With…Allan Greene

June 5, 2012 by 4dancers

Today on 10 Questions With… we have Allan Greene, a pianist that works in the dance world…

We would also like to welcome Allan to our contributing writer staff here at 4dancers. He’ll be writing a new monthly column appropriately titled, “Music Notes”…

1. How did you get started in music?

I started composing on my own when I was eight years old after I tired of copying songs from our third grade songbooks. The next year I began studying the cello at my elementary school, and the next year I began studying piano with the wife of one of my father’s electronic engineer colleagues. Things moved rapidly from there.

The cantor at my family’s synagogue recommended me to a Viennese choir-master who passed me on to an eccentric Juilliard-trained pianist. The intensity of the Juilliard training was too much for me and conflicted with Boy Scouts and after-school basketball. I moved on to a retired violinist / pianist who devoted his Saturdays to me, and presented me in recital several months before my 16^th birthday.

All the while I was composing on my own. At the age of twelve I was composing suites of atonal works, for various chamber music combinations as well as solo piano. My high school choir performed a setting I created of a poem by James Joyce. Stylistically, I was heading out the trajectory blazed by Charles Ives, inventing what I called “stream-of-consciousness music” analogous to Joyce’s literary technique: I created a musical narrative out of musical objets trouvés, using juxtaposition of styles and recognizable snippets to shape the drama. A generation later, due to the invention of sampling synthesizers, personal computers and audio production software, some of my ideas were independently showing up as common compositional tools in film and television scores.

2. What brought you into the dance world?

Accompanying ballet and modern dance classes was a work-study contract gig available at Carleton College (Northfield, Minnesota) in my freshman year. After a term washing dishes at one of the college’s cafeterias, it was a god-send. I found it easy, delightful to watch and participate in, and, importantly, made being a musician both quotidian and artistic. I’ve never liked having the spotlight trained on me, so this allowed me to participate and observe simultaneously. Accompanying dance became a laboratory for me to study the effect on collaborating artists of all kinds of music and all sorts of harmonies, melodies, rhythms and textures. It still is.

3. Where has your career taken you in terms of playing for dancers? [Read more…]

When Ballet Stars Align

April 11, 2012 by Risa Kaplowitz

Today I’d like to introduce our newest contributor–Risa Gary Kaplowitz. She’ll be doing a monthly column for 4dancers, and today we begin with a bit of her “back story” so you can get to know her a bit…

by Risa Gary Kaplowitz

It’s a wonderful thing to realize how lucky you are. I don’t mean the gratuitous “grateful” we all read on Facebook posts when a “friend” gloats about one thing or another and then says, “So blessed!” Nope. I mean how great it feels to acknowledge the really big decision or moment of good fortune without which your life would be completely different.

I had such a realization a few months ago when I attended the 90^th birthday celebration for Tensia Fonseca, Artistic Director of Maryland Youth Ballet. It was she who started the now nationally recognized school and youth company almost 50 years ago in the barre-lined basement of her cozy suburban home.

I came to what at that time was called, Maryland School of the Ballet when I was three years old. My mom had taken me to my first ballet class at the local recreation center where Mrs. Fonseca’s business partner at the time, Roy Gean, was teaching pre-ballet. After class, he told my mom that I showed promise and asked if she would bring me to their newly built one room studio on St. Elmo Ave. in Bethesda.

The rest of my life can be traced back to the moment my mom said, “Yes.” [Read more…]

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