Dionne Figgins, appointed creative director of Ballet Tech in 2021, brings in depth skilled expertise and a deep funding in training to her management position at this distinctive New York Metropolis public faculty that mixes lecturers and classical ballet coaching. Ballet Tech Throughout New York, a brand new initiative to supply free dance lessons in New York Metropolis elementary colleges, showcases Figgins’ imaginative and prescient, however she is fast to deflect all of the credit score. Figgins says that what Eliot Feld created in 1996 by establishing Ballet Tech as a self-contained public faculty is “monumental,” and she or he’s proud to work with a group of colleagues who’ve come collectively to design these new lessons.
Figgins skilled on the legendary Jones-Haywood College of Ballet (now Jones-Haywood Dance College) in Washington, DC, then danced main roles as a member of Dance Theatre of Harlem and carried out within the Broadway reveals Motown: The Musical and Memphis, amongst others. Her focus now’s on creating caring environments for dancers, and she or he’s guiding Ballet Tech’s latest initiative to make dance training extra accessible in New York Metropolis’s public colleges.
Dancing is essential no matter whether or not you’re going to do it professionally or not. Ballet Tech Throughout New York is about college students having a very enriching expertise with dance. Clearly, our hope is that college students will graduate from Ballet Tech and use their coaching to proceed pursuing dance and the performing arts, however what about all the scholars who select to not pursue performative arts? How are we partaking them? Creating a secure setting for individuals to discover dance encourages individuals to stay concerned in the dance neighborhood.
We’re giving one thing again to those communities which might be permitting us to return into their colleges to establish potential college students for our program. These enrichment packages enable us the chance to see past what the bodily physique seems to be wish to all the opposite parts that make a dancer a dancer: creativity, musicality, coordination, and the flexibility to comply with instructions. An audition course of might really feel extractive, like we’re moving into figuring out college students who’ve expertise and taking them out of their communities. Now, we’re ensuring all the scholars have a extremely nice expertise with dance.
Ballet Tech Throughout New York gives two totally different tracks. There are colleges that have already got dance constructed into their programming, and people colleges would possibly need one thing that’s just a little extra rigorous, our BT Ballet Fundamentals. The second monitor, Dance for EveryBODY, lets everyone know that they will dance. The fact is that some our bodies don’t wish to have a straightened knee or a pointed foot, or turnout, and those our bodies ought to additionally be capable to entry dance. Within the Dance for EveryBODY class, we do some inventive motion, some improvisation, some isolations, and a few ballet steps, as effectively.
I’m making an attempt to supply college students with what I’d have needed for myself and my friends once I was coaching. I grew up studying ballet in a predominantly Black dance neighborhood. I didn’t should assimilate and go away my cultural expressions of motion on the studio door, an expertise I’ve heard time and time once more from different Black dance professionals coaching in predominantly white ballet areas.
When you find yourself Black in ballet, it’s much more urgent to have the ability to have a essential, mental dialog about ballet, since you may not be taken critically in sure areas if you happen to can’t. I would like college students to have as a lot language and as a lot studying as attainable. Can we be essential about tales like Swan Lake? It’s a super-problematic story: Von Rothbart is preserving all these ladies in opposition to their will. Being essential of those works permits us to breathe new life into them, making them extra accessible and relatable to this technology.
Dance shouldn’t be particular for any specific physique sort or cultural group. It’s one thing that every one of us can get pleasure from. Generally individuals conflate “ballet” with “dance.” However ballet is only one approach individuals dance, not the one approach. I wish to give college students as a lot data as attainable, in order that they have as many choices as attainable as they enter the ever-evolving world of dance.
