Is this a bad idea?

[TomarkenFan89]

Hi.

 

I go to 2 schools - one is a professional school (New Jersey School of Ballet) and the other is not a pro school but it's not a dolly dinkle one either. I am not planning to go pro, but I take as many classes as I can per week because I love ballet so much.

 

Anyway, I had class at the non-pro school last night. My teacher there, who while she trained at the School of American Ballet, has a VERY WEIRD way of teaching the classes. In terms of center work, it is by no means a traditional center work (center tendu, adagio, turns, jumps in place, petit allegro, and grand allegro). In fact, when we get to center, it seems as if each week she only wants us to work on one particular thing (like one week she'll want us to just do adagio, another week jumps, another week turns...)

 

She did something last night that kind of disturbed me. After we did our adagio, she told us to go put on our pointe shoes for pointework. And then, after we did our 10-15 minutes of pointework (nothing too hard; some weeks she makes pointework harder), she told us to put on our regular ballet shoes again so we could do turns. I just found this very odd. If I were teaching a ballet class, I would keep everything 100% "traditional" and I would not have any students do any kind of pointework until after a full technique class in flat shoes. This teacher is getting up in years (yet she still looks great!), so I'm wondering if that has anything to do with these very odd ways of teaching ballet.

 

Does anyone else find this way a problem?

Roxie

[Victoria Leigh]

Well, Roxie, it is a bit "different" I don't much care for the idea of a whole center of jumps, for instance. Or adagio either. Turn classes can be good once in a while. However, taking OFF pointe shoes for turns does not make much sense to me. I would either have the class do the whole center on pointe, or not until the end, after a regular center.