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Interviews, essays and commentary published by The Dance Current.

Monday, October 31, 2011

What Do Dancers Know?

On life, movement and brain elasticity
By Sheila Heti

Several years ago, I performed in a ballet. I played the part of the “non-dancer”, although I danced.

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Four women danced with me – all members of The National Ballet of Canada. I loved seeing them stretching all the time, eating hummus and carrot sticks, and talking on their phones to their boyfriends, who did not dance.

Late one afternoon, two of the dancers and I were sitting on a park bench near the rehearsal hall, when we noticed two old men doing what people sometimes do when they walk toward each other on the street: they stepped toward the road, blocking each other’s path, then stepped in the other direction, then toward the road, several times, unable to get by. Finally, one of the old men took the other by the shoulders, positioned him to the right, and moved by.

Leslie, one of the dancers, watching it, said, “That has never happened to me – never – that sidewalk dance.”

What?” I had thought it was a universal human experience, but the other dancer, Agata, agreed with Leslie.

“That has never happened to me, either. How does it happen?”

“What do you mean, how does it happen?” I said. “How does it not happen?”

Leslie shrugged. “Maybe I always know exactly where I’m headed, and it’s really clear to other people on the street where I’m headed.”

Agata confirmed: “When you’re dancing across a stage, the most important thing is that you see the spot you’re dancing toward, and you move toward it with clarity, so everyone can tell where you’re going.”

This made sense to me. If a dancer doesn’t move across the stage with true intention – with so much purpose and certainty that it communicates to all the other dancers, “This is where I’m going,” you would always see dancers knocking into each other in a dance performance. That skill – of knowing (and so communicating) exactly where you’re going, and so getting there – this was a skill that dancers took with them into the world.

Their experience of being human was slightly different from everyone else’s, since dancing had trained their bodies in specific ways.

“I never bump into anything,” Leslie said. “I must just have a really good sense of my body in space.”


Six months later, it was winter, and nothing felt any good. I felt outside the current of life. I was nostalgic for the summer, when I had been dancing and hanging around the dancers, learning new things. Those six weeks, everything had felt fresh: there was movement and music. I was using my body in strange ways. I was fully distracted from the question that had preoccupied my mind for the nine months before I started dancing – a question that returned, that winter, with real force.

It had not been two years since my husband and I had divorced, and I still did not know why our life together, which had not been so bad, had come to an end. The week I moved out of the house we shared, I called my mother in confusion and grief. She told me, “One day you’ll understand. Don’t think about it now. It’s too soon to know why.”

It was the most useful advice she had given me, and for some time the puzzle left me, but by that winter, it was back, and it was soon all I could think about. Why we divorced – it was the first thing my mind went to when I woke up, the last thing I thought of before I slept. It preoccupied me night and day.

How I longed to live in accord with my mother’s advice – to have the question rest in the back of my mind as I lived my life, an answer one day coming to me. How could I return to the happy, unfettered place I had been in while dancing; how could I retrieve that mental freedom I had known only six months ago?

In a bookstore one overcast and wintry day, I picked up a book that called to me: The Brain That Changes Itself by University of Toronto professor Norman Doidge.

I went to a café and began to read. Conventionally, neuroscientists thought of the brain as an organ that did its major constructive work in early childhood, finishing off its work in adolescence, and then remaining fixed (or deteriorating) through adulthood. Doidge’s book elaborated a more radical and contemporary line of thought: the brain is “plastic” and its structure changes throughout one’s life.

Pathways that have been underused can be strengthened, and pathways that have been strengthened from overuse can be weakened from disuse. “Use it or lose it,” as the neuroscientists say. As someone whose brain was stuck on the problem of her divorce – someone who hoped to turn her mind from that path – I tied myself to that statement, and to its corollary: “If you want to lose it, don’t use it.”

I remembered my day in the park with Agata and Leslie. Their experience of never doing that sidewalk dance had something to teach me, I was sure. I wanted to be like them. I didn’t want to dance with my divorce while walking down the street the way those old men danced with each other.

What was it about a dancer? Dancers – unlike the rest of us – have somewhere to go. They have a clear intention. My mind, knocking into my divorce, was feeble, where their bodies excelled. Their bodies were the embodiment of clarity, intention, direction, discipline. I had to get my mind to be more like their bodies. I had to make it clear, directional, disciplined.

That winter, I carried Doidge’s book with me everywhere, and underlined sentences on every page. Beside some underlines, I put stars: Neurons that fire together wire together **.

If a woman thinks about her divorce at a corner of the city, every corner of the city reminds her of her divorce. I soon became aware of how everything – books, trees, preparing food, sunlight – was wired to my divorce. Whatever fired, the mystery of my marriage fired with it.

If I didn’t want to think about my marriage, I couldn’t think about anything.

My purpose now was clear: to train my mind to be more like a dancer’s body. To do this, I knew I would have to start with my body: Make it like a dancer, I told myself, and maybe your mind will follow – your will purposeful and under your control, so you can direct your thoughts cleanly and confidently in the direction you want to go in – so your thoughts move across the stage of your mind with precision and ease.

I walked down the cold, city streets, and I tried to be aware of my body’s reality in space – its relation to people and things.

Paying attention to my corporeal nature for the first time ever, I focussed on the limits of my skin – I tried to know how far (and in what ways) I extended in the world. Without knowing this, I would surely knock into my marriage forever.

I tried to sense my actual height, the shape of my arms and legs. It was strange: without meaning to or being aware of it, my mind had settled on an understanding of my body that did not correspond with my body at all. My mind took my body as extending a foot or two beyond my actual flesh; it was blobby, not the narrow shape of arms, a torso and legs. I had been experiencing my body in a fabricated way; was everything else – like my understanding of my marriage and my divorce – as far from reality as that?

I started to see how different my life would be had I spent it dancing. A writer engages with possibility; the imagination accepts all things. One version of reality is made of the same substance as any other; truth does not have a certain substance that less truthful versions of the truth lack. But a dancer doesn’t abide in fantasy and imagination. The body has its limits, and a dancer is constantly aware of her body’s constraints and nature’s laws. While the mind can go anywhere, the body cannot.

The world wasn’t imagination. The world was flesh. I was flesh. And our divorce was flesh, too.

But this knowledge did me no good. Experiencing the limits of my skin, while interesting, did not prevent my thoughts from knocking into my divorce right and left. My attempt to make my mind like a dancer’s – intentional – got me nowhere.


As I read on in Doidge’s book, I learned some new things: that the brain is most elastic, and produces the greatest number of freedom chemicals (my non-scientific term for the chemicals that put the brain in a plastic state where the most change occurs) in early childhood. Neuroscientists theorize that early childhood plasticity is related to not knowing the value of things; one thing is as important as anything else. Children take in dust particles on the ground with as much serious absorption as they take in the sounds that come from their parents’ mouths, as the sight of a truck going down the street.

Everything is important.

Change becomes harder as one becomes older because the brain has settled on what is important. The brain pays more attention to certain things – maybe the same things over and over – and leaves other stimuli – stimuli that could potentially change it – behind.

I realized I had been going about my task all wrong. The problem with my mind wasn’t that it lacked intention – had nowhere to go – but rather, it knew, with all too much certainty, what path was important, and it went there with way too much zeal. I had trained my mind, as a writer, as rigorously as those dancers had trained their bodies. It wasn’t that my brain was knocking into my divorce at every step, but that my brain danced across the same line of the stage, always to the same point somewhere near the wings, where my divorce stood.

I had to make my mind less like a dancer’s! I had to scramble it up, confuse it, so it could find meaning and value in other places; so it could bump into so much: lampposts, political history, asbestos, peanuts, all things. The dancers were a negative example.

I had to become like those old men on the sidewalk, knocking into things, each other. That was their freedom – their very free dance.

Now I knew what I had to do, yet I could not do it. I was unable to find everything equally interesting – the streetlamp, the ceiling, an orange peel on the floor. I could not pretend that puzzling through the economic situation of Venezuela had as much pull as why my marriage had not worked out.

I had to accept it: my brain was like a dancer in Swan Lake. It had to dance stage right, then toward the footlights, then swirl off-stage, then on, the same way every night until closing, even if it was driving me mad. My brain would have to move in all the ways I was exhaustingly familiar with until this particular production was over. I had to let it play.

And that is what I did, giving up. Some nights I paid attention to the show. Sometimes, like a stage mother, I ate a candy bar and watched it with half a mind.

Then, without expecting it, a few years later, in the course of one night, the production ended.

I had a dream. I was sitting in a white tub, in an all-white room, with a circle of my female friends standing around. I was explaining to them why my husband and I broke up. Then an older woman – whom I had never dreamed about before, but who in real life owned the hotel where my marriage finally ended – entered the room and asked me what I had been saying. I told her that I was explaining the reason for my divorce.

“Was the sex not good?” she asked.

I shook my head. “It’s because he wasn’t strong.”

When I woke, I remembered the dream in its entirety. I wondered if this explanation was right or fair. It was not a reason that had occurred to me in my waking life even once. I could see how it could be “the reason”, but I could also see how I had also not been “strong”.

What was more important, perhaps, was the feeling I had waking from the dream – like the stage of my mind had been struck. (To strike is a theatrical term for taking down the set, the flats, the risers, everything, once a show is over.)

Yes, I felt better. The stage of my mind was struck.

That night, I wanted a drink. I called a friend and asked her to meet me at a bar I knew well, near where we lived. When I entered, sitting at the bar was the grey-haired owner of the hotel I had dreamed about the night before. It felt bizarre to see her there. I ran into her maybe twice a year. I went up to her to tell her I had dreamed about her.

“Last night you were in my dream,” I said.

Her eyes widened. “I dreamed about you last night,” she said, and she proceeded to tell me her dream: “We were in the Arctic. There was nothing but snow. And you were worried. You couldn’t figure something out, but you were trying very hard. I said to you: ‘Watch the polar bears. That’s where you will find the answer.’ Then we watched a polar bear that was sitting on an ice floe, and then the ice floe drifted away from the land, away from the few other polar bears that were there.”

I didn’t know what to make of this. We had both dreamed of these all-white places, in which we had had somewhat the same conversation.

After saying wow and wow and wow, I went to sit on my own, at a little round table. I considered what a beautiful closing image to a ballet that would be – a ballet about divorce, say, and what it means to separate – like being a polar bear, mysteriously floating away from one’s people and land.



A version of What Do Dancers Know? Originally appeared in Boulder Pavement, the digital arts journal of The Banff Centre Press.


Sheila Heti is the author of five books of fiction and non-fiction, most recently, the novel How Should a Person Be? and the children's book We Need a Horse. She lives in Toronto.








Sheila Heti / Photo by Chris Buck


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Feature: Ballet Gloom or Bloom?: A Meditation on the State of the Art

Article by Michael Crabb

Summary | Sommaire

Aleksander Antonijevic and Bridgett Zehr in Chroma by Wayne McGregor for the National Ballet of Canada / Photo by Cylla von Tiedemann

There’s nothing like controversy to boost book sales and, when it comes to stirring a hornet’s nest, American dance critic Jennifer Homans has done her publisher proud with Apollo’s Angels.

La controverse alimente particulièrement bien la vente de livres, et quand il s’agit de semer la pagaille, la critique de danse américaine Jennifer Homans a rempli son éditeur de fierté avec Apollo’s Angels, A History of Ballet.

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There’s nothing like controversy to boost book sales and, when it comes to stirring a hornet’s nest, American dance critic Jennifer Homans has done her publisher proud with Apollo’s Angels. Subtitled A History of Ballet, Homans’ book, published last fall, might have fallen off the radar had it not been for its mournful “Epilogue” in which the author argues that classical ballet is emitting death rattles. In the absence of choreographers who can move the art forward, ballet companies wallow in “an age of retrospective,” Homans writes, endlessly repeating lavish productions of the 19th-century classics. What new work is presented is wanting in the ideals Homans stakes as ballet’s bedrock. For ballet to return to its past glory, the New Republic dance critic believes “honor and decorum, civility and taste would have to make a comeback.” Yet Homans is hardly the first to question ballet’s health. Through the ages, rumours of the demise of classical ballet have been regularly circulated. In this essay, critic and writer Michael Crabb argues that ballet is alive and well in the 21st and talks to a number of artistic directors, choreographers and writers in the field – including Karen Kain, Jean Grand-Maitre, Aszure Barton and Wendy Perron – about why.


La controverse alimente particulièrement bien la vente de livres, et quand il s’agit de semer la pagaille, la critique de danse américaine Jennifer Homans a rempli son éditeur de fierté avec Apollo’s Angels, A History of Ballet. Publié l’automne passé, le livre aurait peut-être échapper au radar si ce n’était pas pour un triste « épilogue » ou l’auteur propose que le ballet classique émette des gémissements funèbres. En l’absence de chorégraphes qui font progresser la forme, les compagnies de ballet se vautrent dans une « ère de rétrospection », écrit Homans, et reprennent éternellement les somptueux classiques du XIXe siècle. Lorsqu’il y a de nouvelles créations, elles s’éloignent des idéaux décrits comme la pierre angulaire du ballet selon Homans. « Il faudrait un retour à l’honneur et à la bienséance, à la civilité et au goût », déclare la critique de danse du New Republic. Elle est loin d’être la seule à se pencher sur la santé du ballet. Au fil du temps, les rumeurs sur déclin du ballet courent. Dans son essai, le critique et auteur Michael Crabb soutien que le ballet est en pleine forme au XXIe siècle, et il en parle à plusieurs directeurs artistiques, chorégraphes et auteurs dans le domaine, y compris Karen Kain, Jean Grand-Maitre, Aszure Barton et Wendy Perron.


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In Conversation: Marie Chouinard

Interview by Catherine Bush

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Marie Chinouard / Photo by Karine Patry

All dance is about being in the body but in Marie Chouinard’s extraordinary work, the corporeality of the body is front and centre.

Toute danse porte sur le corps, mais dans l’œuvre extraordinaire de Marie Chouinard, la corporéité est à l’avant-plan.

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All dance is about being in the body but in Marie Chouinard’s extraordinary work, the corporeality of the body is front and centre. She’s been creating dance now for over thirty years, first as a solo artist and then as choreographer for her Compagnie Marie Chouinard, and continues to create dance that is astonishing and vital, often breathtaking, dance that has its roots in ritual and play yet with movement that continually reinvents itself. These days, Marie Chouinard and her company are based in a studio building, Espace Marie Chouinard, on L’Esplanade in Montréal. She’s had a conference devoted to her work 24 Preludes by Chopin, and her dancers were awarded a Gemini for their performance in the film of bODY_rEMIX/gOLDBERG_vARIATIONS. Her most recent piece, Henri Michaux: Mouvements premiered in Vienna in August 2011. It’s perhaps no surprise that Marie Chouinard keeps a jam-packed schedule. Novelist Catherine Bush managed to fit in a phone conversation with her one morning promptly at nine a.m. as she arrived at the studio. Their discussion was wide-ranging, touching on topics such as nudity, structure, the search for beauty and how a dancer’s body changes with time.

Toute danse porte sur le corps, mais dans l’œuvre extraordinaire de Marie Chouinard, la corporéité est à l’avant-plan. Elle compose des danses depuis plus de trente ans, d’abord comme artiste solo et ensuite au sein de la Compagnie Marie Chouinard. Ses créations demeurent surprenantes et vitales, souvent étourdissantes ; sa danse est ancrée dans le rituel et le jeu, sa gestuelle en perpétuelle réinvention. Sa compagnie occupe actuellement un immeuble, l’Espace Marie Chouinard, sur la rue de l’Esplanade à Montréal. Il y a eu un colloque sur sa pièce Les 24 préludes de Chopin et ses interprètes ont mérité un prix Gémaux pour leur travail dans le film bODY_rEMIX/les_vARIATIONS_gOLDBERG. Sa dernière création, Henri Michaux : Mouvements a été présentée en première à Vienne en août 2011. Ainsi, l’horaire très chargé de Chouinard ne surprend personne. Néanmoins, la romancière Catherine Bush réussit à la joindre au téléphone, précisément à 9 h, lors de son arrivée aux studios. Leur discussion touche à bien des sujets, notamment la nudité, la structure, la quête de la beauté et le changement du corps de l’interprète au fil du temps.


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Profile: Jordan Clarke

Canada's Favorite Dancer
Article by Kathleen Smith

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Jordan Clark with So You Think You Can Dance Canada's Season 4 Top 22 Finalists / Photo courtesy of CTV

As the competition gets stiffer and stiffer each season on hugely popular television dance shows such as So You Think You Can Dance, more and more spectacular dance talent is being unleashed on the viewing public. Sadly, in Canada at least, this showcase vehicle for dance has come to an end with the September cancellation of So You Think You Can Dance Canada (SYTYCDC).

Alors que la concurrence devient de plus en plus féroce aux immensément populaires émissions de danse comme So You Think You Can Dance, plus en plus de talents exceptionnels se révèlent aux téléspectateurs. Au Canada, l’annulation en septembre dernier de So You Think You Can Dance Canada (SYTYCDC) entraîne la disparition d’une vitrine pour la danse – un événement malheureux pour quelqu’un comme Jordan Clark, dix-neuf ans, native de Tottenham, Ontario, couronnée danseuse préférée au Canada deux jours avant l’annulation de l’émission.

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As the competition gets stiffer and stiffer each season on hugely popular television dance shows such as So You Think You Can Dance, more and more spectacular dance talent is being unleashed on the viewing public. Sadly, in Canada at least, this showcase vehicle for dance has come to an end with the September cancellation of So You Think You Can Dance Canada (SYTYCDC). That’s a shame for someone like Jordan Clark, the nineteen-year old Tottenham, Ontario native who was crowned Canada’s Favourite Dancer just 2 days before the show was cancelled.

Although the untimely announcement stole some of the redhead’s winning thunder, Clark isn’t miffed, just sad: “It’s really unfortunate that the show was cancelled. Canada is not going to forget about the great dancers that have been on this show, and great Canadian dancers in general.” SYTYCDC helped to introduce and educate new audiences about dance, Clark believes. “It takes a very long time to understand what dance is all about – I think that’s part of what’s so intriguing about it. It’s part of the reason why it’s becoming way more popular to kids.”


Alors que la concurrence devient de plus en plus féroce aux immensément populaires émissions de danse comme So You Think You Can Dance, plus en plus de talents exceptionnels se révèlent aux téléspectateurs. Au Canada, l’annulation en septembre dernier de So You Think You Can Dance Canada (SYTYCDC) entraîne la disparition d’une vitrine pour la danse – un événement malheureux pour quelqu’un comme Jordan Clark, dix-neuf ans, native de Tottenham, Ontario, couronnée danseuse préférée au Canada deux jours avant l’annulation de l’émission. Bien que la malencontreuse annonce appauvrisse la victoire de la rousse, Clark exprime la tristesse plutôt que la colère : « C’est vraiment dommage que le programme ait été annulé. Le Canada n’oubliera pas les grands danseurs présentés à l’émission, ni les grands danseurs canadiens en général. » Selon elle, SYTYCDC a aidé à sensibiliser de nouveaux publics à la danse. « Comprendre la danse est un processus très long qui, du coup, la rend très intrigante », déclare-t-elle, « Ça fait partie des raisons que la forme gagne en popularité auprès des jeunes. »


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Report: Master Plans

Charting Canadian Dance

Summary | Sommaire

Three major policy and research projects around dance are currently being rolled out across the country.

Actuellement, au pays, trois grands projets de politiques et de recherche en danse se déploient.

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Three major policy and research projects around dance are currently being rolled out across the country. The Regroupement québécois de la danse (RQD)’s Master Plan, the Canadian Dance Assembly’s I love Dance/j’aime la danse program and the Canada Council for the Arts Dance Office’s Mapping Dance Project all seek to achieve a better understanding of Canadian dance culture in order to describe it, protect it and promote it.
Dance faces many challenges. As a discipline, it somehow manages to be both under siege – by way of funding cuts and live audience apathy – and more wildly popular and culturally meaningful than ever before. It’s a paradox and it’s nothing new.

Actuellement, au pays, trois grands projets de politiques et de recherche en danse se déploient. Le Plan directeur de la danse du Regroupement québécois de la danse, la campagne I love dance/J’aime la danse de l’Assemblée canadienne de la danse et l’Étude cartographique de la danse du Conseil des Arts du Canada visent tous à développer une meilleure compréhension de la culture de danse canadienne afin de la décrire, de la protéger et de la promouvoir. De nombreux défis se présentent à la forme d’art. En tant que discipline, elle se trouve à la fois assiégée – par des compressions de financement et l’apathie du public quant à l’expérience du spectacle – et d’une popularité et d’une pertinence culturelle jusque-là inégalée. C’est un paradoxe et ce n’est pas nouveau.


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Friday, October 28, 2011

ASTUCES POUR PROFESSEURS: TIPS FOR TEACHERS

Confort et sécurité par temps froid
de Katharine Harris de l’École nationale de ballet du Canada

Le Canada étant une nation de temps froid, les Canadiens savent comment affronter le froid. Cela dit, alors que les journées raccourcissent et que les températures commencent à chuter, c’est toujours une bonne idée de rappeler à vos élèves les meilleures façons de prévenir les blessures et de danser en santé et en sécurité au cours de l’hiver.
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1. Exprimer clairement votre politique sur les manteaux et bottes d’hiver dans le studio. S’il y a un lieu désigné pour les mettre dans le couloir, soulignez-le aux élèves et aux parents. Identifiez la zone, si possible. Vous ne voulez pas qu’un retardataire entre dans le studio propre avec un manteau, un chapeau et des bottes mouillées ; la communication claire est le meilleur moyen d’éviter cela.

2. Prenez le temps de revoir les vêtements de réchauffement convenables avec vos élèves. Rappelez-leur qu’ils auront besoin de porter plus de couches en hiver, et qu’ils garderont les vêtements de réchauffement pendant plus longtemps.

3. Plusieurs élèves arrivent au studio prêts, déjà en costume de danse. Au cours des temps froids, elles mettront bottes et manteau par-dessus maillot et collant, et se précipiteront entre la voiture et le studio. Parlez aux élèves et aux parents sur l’importance des vêtements de réchauffement. Plus les muscles restent au chaud, moins il y a de blessures. La clé pour cela, c’est une couche supplémentaire de vêtements.

4. Les jours de grand froid, préparez un réchauffement au sol ou un enchaînement aérobique afin d’activer et de réchauffer le corps. Si vos élèves ont accès au studio avant la classe, encouragez-les à s’étirer doucement dans le studio.

5. Si vous n’avez pas accès au studio avant la classe, préparer un exercice d’étirement de conditionnement léger que les élèves peuvent faire dans le vestiaire ou à la maison.

6. Rappelez à vos élèves qu’un réchauffement peut-être plus long en hiver qu’en été ou qu’à l’automne. Encouragez-les à écouter leur corps, à prendre le temps de s’étirer, de se réchauffer et d’enlever leurs vêtements de réchauffement quand ils sont prêts et non quand les autres le font.

7. Encouragez une hygiène rigoureuse en hiver. Avec tout le monde à l’intérieur pendant plus longtemps, la propagation de rhumes et de grippes est assez facile. Assurez-vous que les salles de toilettes du studio sont bien équipées en savon et en papier essuie-tout ou avec un séchoir électrique fonctionnel. Songez à offrir un désinfectant pour les mains à l’entrée du studio. Essuyez régulièrement les barres et autres surfaces communes.

L’hiver est partie intégrante de la vie au Canada et compte de nombreuses qualités. Avec un peu de temps et de préparation, c’est simple de garder le corps en sécurité, en santé et en activité.


Cold Weather Comfort and Safety
By Katherine Harris of Canada’s National Ballet School

Canada is a nation of winter and thus Canadians know how to handle the cold. That said, as the days grow shorter and temperatures start to fall, it’s always a good idea to remind yourself and your students about the best way to prevent injuries and ensure healthy and safe dancing in the winter months.

1. Be clear about your policy on winter boots and coats in the studio. If you have a special place in the hallway where they are to be kept, be sure to point it out to all your students and their parents. Mark the area clearly, if possible. You don’t want latecomers bringing wet jackets, hats and boots into your clean studio; clear communication is the best way to prevent this.

2. Take the time to review appropriate warm up gear with your students. Remind them that more layers will be needed in colder weather, and that warm-up wear will likely need to stay on for longer during winter months.

3. Many students arrive at their studios wearing dance clothes, ready to go. In the colder months, they’ll throw boots and a jacket over their leotard and tights, and run from the car into the studio and back again. Talk to your students and their parents about the importance of wearing warm up layers. Protecting muscles against the cold means less injuries and an extra layer of clothing is key for this.

4. On colder days, prepare a warm-up sequence involving floor work or aerobic activity to get the body moving and warm. If it’s possible for your students to get into the studio before class begins, encourage them to do so and start some gentle stretches before class.

5. If early access to the studio isn’t possible, prepare a gentle stretching/conditioning sequence for students to work on in the change room or at home.

6. Remind your students that a proper warm-up may take longer in the winter than it did in the summer and fall. Encourage your students to listen to their bodies and take the proper time to stretch and warm up and to remove layers, as each student feels appropriate, not just when other members of the class do.

7. Encourage high standards of sanitation in the winter. With everyone inside more often, it’s quite easy for colds and flus to spread. Be sure your studio’s washroom is fully stocked with soap and paper towels or a working hand dryer. Consider providing hand sanitizer at the entrance to your studio. Wipe down barres and other common surfaces on a routine basis.

Winter is a big part of life in Canada and brings with it many wonderful things. It’s easy to keep the body safe, healthy and active throughout the colder months with a little thought and preparation.



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