Performance of the Dance Secret Ballet Studio

Some people are lucky to understand immediately, after the first class or a couple of classes, if their teacher is good. Others are not immediately satisfied and keep looking. Normally 2-3 classes with one teacher are enough to understand if he/she is good enough. Here's what we recommend to assess the situation correctly.

1. Your teacher is the key. Its the teacher (not the nice interior and the convenient location of a studio) who will motivate you to do ballet. When trying to figure out if your teacher is good, pay attention to these 2 things:

• Your result should matter to the teacher. If a class is based on the "I show - you repeat" principle, it's not a good sign. If the teacher shows the technique tips and tricks and really follows up if you're managing - it's a very good sign.

• The teacher should correct you physically. Yes, you got it right. Ballet teachers often correct students with their hands to show the right way to do it. Only words are not enough.

2. Listen to yourself. If you tried several classes and didn't like them, try to figure out why. In most cases the cause of this is the approach of the teacher. In this case it's better to look for another teacher that will meet your needs more than the current one.

3. Keep looking even if you liked the teacher. It's a good idea to always be open to try new teachers, even if you really like your current one. In this way you will know more about different approaches and different types of teachers. And, as you progress and things change, you will see a wider picture and maybe will wish to combine the classes of your current teacher with some other one. Or, if for now ballet is just a pleasant hobby for you, if you get more serious, you will know where to find a serious approach.

Evgenia Budrina¹: "Once I went to a class with a highly recommended teacher. There were also professional ballet school students at his class alongside with amateur adults, which even motivated me even more. But then I saw that the teacher was only working with the professionals and paying zero attention to the adults. I was disappointed to say the least of it and never came back to his classes. If that had been my first ballet class, I would have definitely decided that ballet is not for me."

Mariana Gomes²: "A good teacher knows that even if he sees 50 mistakes at once, he should not correct everything at once. It is up to the teacher to understand what is the first thing to correct, and little by little, day by day, increasing the level of demand for his corrections. Another important factor, how the exercises are designed and in what order. For example, depending on the level of the student, if a lot of effort has been made on legs, heels and students are tired, it is better to switch to port de bras, so that the legs rest and so on."

Lilya Anoshkina³: "A good adult ballet teacher is about serious attention to detail. Also he/she has a whole well-structured knowledge system in his/her head. I went to 9 adult ballet schools in Saint-Petersburg, Russia. And only in one of them I found a teacher who actually knew how to teach, not just to show. He knew that there are several methods of teaching ballet. Very few ballet teachers apply their knowledge to adult ballet students. Most of them don't do it because they are sure that you're doing it just for fun because you're an adult, so it's not worth worth taking a serious approach to the matter."

Notes:

1 - Evgenia Budrina - Adult ballerina, founder of A.Dancer - a project for adult amateur dancers.

2 - Mariana Gomes - Bolshoi ballet dancer, teaches adult ballet in Central ballet school in Moscow, Russia. Brazil's Bolshoi Theatre School graduate.

3 - Lilya Anoshkina - Adult ballerina, doing ballet for 8 years.