The School of Ballet Arizona had their spring performance this past Sunday.  Nancy Crowley, the school director, as well as Betsy Kammerle (whom my daughters love and adore), and Daniel Baudendistel, were the choreographers, should be commended for an excellent performance by the students.  Betsy’s job was choreographing the younger kids, which, if anyone has worked with kindergarten through the lower grades – knows it is like herding cats.  The whole show was professional quality and great to watch.  In fact, it was no different than a professional ballet – except – lots of little dancers.

The show was broken up into two acts – two parts in the first act and three parts in the second.  The first act had all the students in the school (from pre-k to high school seniors) preform the school presentation where all the classes come out and show what they have learned. With the little kids, it doesn’t seem like much - mostly about body position and timing.  The young adults would do the exercises, then four students would come out and combine the exercises together and you would have a dance.  Everything was a culumitive learning process – something learned early on would lead to the new learning the next year.  This is how it works in class – in a sense – the theory.

Then they pause as everyone gets into costumes and they give a performance that ties all the classes together in the ballet.  If a person did not know better, they would have thought they were watching an actual professional ballet production – it was that good.  Theory in action or application of what you have learned.

The second act was a highlight of the final two levels of the school – doing flamingo, a modern, and then a classical ballet – with a guest feature artist from the professional company School of Ballet Arizona recieved the rights to stage George Balanchine’s “Serenade”.  This is because Ballet Arizona’s director Ib Andersen, is one of the few directors to have permission. All very wonderfully done.  I was partial to the feature artist, Chesea Saari, because she was a former student of mine.  Think of how much the students got to learn by working with the professionals from the company.

During the intermission, I was talking to a parent of a student about how the school and the professional company were in partnership together – the company formed the school to have a training ground for future ballarinas of the company.  This got me thinking about how different it is in many industries.  People at age 5 don’t say they want to be an electronics engineer.  How many kids played with Lego Mindstorms and ended up as engineers of some type? 

When we train students to do math and writing, etc., we give them the theory, but what we are not doing is giving them the practical application all the time.  Sure, in Enlgish you learn to write a paper and then you write papers – but how does the writing of papers outside of class, in the work force, compare to writing it in class?  The same with math.  Many students do not see the value of math because they do not see how it relates outside the classroom.  With the spring performance, the students not only learn how to dance, they dance.  They learned that performing takes commitment (lots of rehearsals outside normal class times), time, and practice to put the show together.  They see what they learn, and how they will use it in the ballet/dance world.   Maybe what we need is industry to become more involved with kids and show them that what they learn in school – the theory, can be applied to an industry – an application.  High Tech U does this.  FIRST Robotics does this.  We need more industries to do stuff like this.

Mark Viquesney