Tag: dance students

The 2021 Dance Teacher Awards United Us With Passion and Purpose

If you missed the 2021 Dance Teacher Awards, or want to relive your favorite moments, tune in now to watch on demand here. Last night, the 2021 Dance Teacher Awards made history—twice! First, for celebrating seven remarkable artists, the largest group ever to be honored. And second, for being the most inspiring virtual room I’ve ever been […]

How to Help Your Students Heal Their Relationship With Food and Their Bodies

Dancers are often inundated with harmful messages surrounding body ideals and restrictive dieting behaviors. Target weights, calorie goals and “body talks” are just a few examples of how diet culture infiltrates the studio. Dance educators need to unlearn the messages of diet culture to ultimately support an inclusive and sustainable studio environment. To dismantle the […]

Boston Ballet’s Peter Stark Embarks on New Role as President and Director of The Rock School

The ballet world was stirring last August when it was announced that Bojan Spassoff would be retiring from his role as president and director of The Rock School for Dance Education after more than three decades. Together with his wife, Stephanie, Spassoff has coached some of ballet’s brightest stars, including Michaela DePrince, Isaac and Esteban […]

Welcome to DanceTeacher+!

Welcome to DanceTeacher+—I’m so thrilled you’re here! Now that you’re part of our community, you’ll get access to more insight and inspiration to advance your teaching practice or studio business.  Let me show you around and give you a sampling of what’s in store: Teaching Resources Open the doorway into dance history and rediscover the […]

Why Kathryn Morgan Thinks Musicality Is the Mark of a Professional

“My mother first put me into dance classes because she would watch me hear music and literally try to become it,” says Kathryn Morgan, former soloist with New York City Ballet and Miami City Ballet. True to Balanchine’s famous adage, “See the music, hear the dance,” musicality was the cornerstone of Morgan’s training at the […]

The American Dance Guild Opens Its Treasure Trove of Historic Dances From the New Dance Group

The American Dance Guild’s 2022 Online Festival, which runs from Monday, January 31, through Sunday, February 27, presents 18 historic modern dances from the New Dance Group—offering you and your students a unique opportunity to engage with enlightening, rarely seen dance works and delve deep into the rich heritage and diverse subject matter of modern dance.  Four successive programs, which are set […]

6 Tips for Better Group Work, From the Coach Who’s Trained 51 Rockettes

Odds are, your dancers spent a large portion of the last year and a half dancing alone in their living rooms. Unfortunately, that may mean they’ve lost some of the group chemistry that makes their recital and competition dances so precise and compelling. One person who knows about precise and compelling group chemistry: Rhonda Malkin, […]

The Purpose of Play: How to Bring Fun Into the Dance Studio, for Any Age Group

For Ryan Corriston, James Madison University associate professor of dance, “everything about movement relates to play.” Spending his formative dance years at Anne Green Gilbert’s Seattle-based Creative Dance Center shaped his relationship to play, he says, as did a childhood of sports and “running around in the woods,” along with dancing. But Corriston says that […]

Heels Over Head: How to Get Your Students Comfortable With Being Upside Down

There’s a reason Gus Solomons jr used to begin his semesters at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts with a “handstand day” for his contemporary students. “You’re training your body to do all it can do, upside down is just another possibility,” he says. “When you get there, you see the world differently, […]