Character Building

For the past two weeks, I have been teaching a beginning character class for the summer intensive at our local ballet school. I am not a professional dance teacher, and my only formal training in character happened 30 plus years ago when I was in the RAD curriculum as a pre-vocational student. But last summer, I sort of jumped in and said I would do what I could, and I must not have been too big a disaster because I was asked to come back this summer.

I taught three different levels, meeting with each group twice; a beginner group of 9-10 year olds (I had these kids both weeks, so four times), a more intermediate group of 11-12 year olds, and an advanced intermediate group of 12-14 year olds. Since they were all pretty much new to character, I basically only needed to develop 2 lesson plans, with some latitude for responsiveness to their skills, abilities, and maturity.

Since I'm not a trained character teacher, I did what any noob would do, and turned to the web for help. There's not a ton of content out there that's particularly helpful (watching videos of Vaganova examinations with preprofessional Russians is fun, but really exists in another universe), but I was able to find some videos by Finland International Summer Ballet School that gave me some inspiration, and what with one thing and another, I was able to assemble a pretty basic barre that felt more or less like what I remember from my RAD days. For center, I relied on memory, my ancient RAD notebooks, and the classic Lopukov/Shirayev book, Character Dance, my much annotated copy of which I still have.

One of the things I've always liked about character is the music and the way it demands musicality -- since a lot of the steps are quite simple, if you don't do them with panache, you're basically not doing them right. So I found some albums on iTunes that were appropriate:

Jose Gallastegui's 2013 Music for Ballet Class has a whole set of tracks just for character; the tracks are on the longer side, which makes them great for more advanced students and complex enchainements.

Nina Pinzarrone's 2016 Music for Character Class has shorter tracks, ideal for very simple barre exercises that introduce the fundamentals.

I spent some time with each group, at the beginning, talking with them about what character dance is, and where they've seen it before... most of them have seen, and many of them have performed The Nutcracker, so we started with that. They all knew some steps from the Russian and Spanish variations, which was nice. I also had a couple of kids with ballroom dance experience (it's HUUUUGE in Utah), so they could demonstrate the carriage of the body from that, which is pretty similar to character port de corps. We did some marching around with our hands on our hips, getting into the spirit of things. 

I also made sure they all had skirts to wear (they were all girls). I think the skirt is always what made me conscious, as a student, that I was in character class, and that I needed to live up to the gear. They didn't have character shoes, most of them, but I found that did not really matter. It might have been more fun for them to have a heel, but it certainly made it quieter and less headache inducing that they did not!

So, beskirted and in the spirit of things, we took our place at barre. What I did not realize, never having taught kids that young, was that one basically has to do the whole barre with them when they're learning something so new to them. This makes it hard to give corrections, so it was laborious (and exhausting). Also, nine year olds? They are so WIGGLY!

Barre was sort of torture, but we managed to get through it all eight days, and then move out to center. I think one of the best exercises I gave all the classes was a Verevochka, just because they enjoyed it so much, it looked like a real dance, and they got to spin (in those skirts, it was super fun). My two more advanced groups got the chance to learn a flamenco-inspired bit of choreography each. The more experienced dancers got extreme tempo changes and lots of quick footwork and the intermediates got a chance to really ham it up with their fans. I think they had fun. At least, they were still smiling when they went away, and that at the end of a six hour day of intensive.

I have a lot to learn about teaching dance, about character, about choreography... but it was fun. I feel like I suffered a bit, but that like most things that don't kill you, it made me stronger!