Cecchetti

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…]

Jessica Wilson

by Jessica Wilson

Following the comments made by British Member of Parliament David Willetts, the relationship between dance and education has now been placed under close scrutiny. Dance professionals became increasingly concerned that the position of dance in education was under threat, which consequently sparked the debate. Willetts, Universities and Science Minister, recently remarked that he believed “soft” subjects such as Dance should be of less worth if a student was to apply to attend university. The dance sector strongly rejected this argument. Willetts’s claims were controversially published on the same day in August 2011 as the examination results which precede students’ further studies at university.

At what can only be defined as perfect timing elsewhere in London was the announcement that The Place, the UK’s premier centre for contemporary dance, is to introduce GCSE Dance to their existing teaching schedules. GCSEs are national examinations taken by young people both inside and outside schools; the course offered by The Place is open to students aged 13-18 years old. A parallel to the British school examination system can be observed in the Cecchetti system, used throughout Britain and the United States and enabling students to take exams at different levels and progress to higher grades. GCSE examinations form much of the first preparation for further education and with such promotion by The Place, dance appears to be on the road to recovery. To hear Willetts’s comments on the prospective introduction of this course would be very interesting to say the least. [Read more…]

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

Dance In The UK: “The Place” & Dance Education

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