Starting Ballet

As a ballet teacher a question that I am often asked by parents is:  When can my child start ballet?

                                                  

These are my thoughts and a few guidelines that might help the parent of a future prospective dancer. Different teachers might vary considerably in their opinions but please parents, use common sense as well as listening to the advice of a professional.

Many children and parents have a very confused idea of what constitutes a ballet class.  The difference between what they have possibly seen on stage, film or dvd, that is at performance level and the reality of the classroom environment can be confusing.  I invite all new parents to sit in on that first class so that they can see and experience what we are attempting to achieve and most important, how their child copes.

When I see a child for the first time, at about 4 years, I check whether they are able to take a command and implement it.  It is not the age but the mental and physical readiness that I look for.  The home life and upbringing of the child will greatly affect their behaviour.  Sometimes I suggest they wait another 6 months, either because they lack confidence or because they are not ready to learn and see it as another playgroup. Above all the child must be ready and willing to learn.

So what do you teach children of this age?

Teaching a young child or anyone for that matter is both simple and complex. The teaching content must be understood and that is where the complexity comes in because everyone does not learn the same way or at the same speed or to the same degree of comprehension.  So whatever you teach you must be able to put balances in place to see that the person has understood what you have taught and not just copied what you did or learnt by rote.  That way memory will be able to be applied so the learning process can proceed quite easily.

That is my theory but the reality is again slightly different.  Children, most of them, love to move and one must take advantage of that and build learning into that natural ability.  Dance is about moving to music and expressing emotion.  Again exactly what children love to do so I use that inclination to lead them into the realm of pointed feet, straight backs, bending knees when landing from a jump and much later on applying the turn out of the legs in selected movements.

Everything experienced in the ballet class is perfectly natural and what the body was designed to do.  Ballet dancers at high level of training and performance simply take this to the nth degree.