Royal Ballet School Research Articles

Royal ballet school

royal ballet school

Historical schooling: ballet style and technique

ABSTRACT Aiming to challenge the notion that the ballet lexicon is ahistorical, this study focuses on the ballet classroom. Training plays a vital role in how ballets are performed, and past choreography needs a different approach from that of contemporary ballets. Previous studies of classroom movement, while acknowledging different Schools, have not dealt with the effect on the dancer of diverse training systems. To explore this, I filmed three students from the Royal Ballet School, who learned sections from a syllabus, constructed by Ninette de Valois in 1947, to investigate how aesthetic values, implicit in the syllabus, differed from those of today. Contemporary source material was used to examine the values of the era revealing the extent to which those principles significantly influenced the syllabus. To test this, the study compared the English values with those of George Balanchine and contemporary American writers. Balanchine’s classroom technique was also largely constructed at about the same time as de Valois’s. The findings show that embodying the past through earlier values can be an effective way of communicating with today’s dancers, highlighting how such principles change.

Bone mineral density in adolescent elite ballet dancers.

Data documenting BMD in pre-professional adolescent ballet dancers is limited. This cross-sectional study assesses bone mineral density (BMD) in young adolescent elite ballet dancers and compares BMD values between males and females (with and without normal menarche) and body composition between dancers with and without low Z-score. Cross-sectional study of third year ballet students (female=23; male=15; mean age 14.7 years; SD: 0.5) of The Royal Ballet School of Antwerp (Belgium) training 22 hours a week. They completed questionnaires and underwent dual energy X-ray absorptiometry (DXA) to measure BMD and body composition. Each female participant completed questionnaires assessing menstrual status. DXA revealed that 12 out of 38 (32%) of the dancers had Z-score <-1. On average, male dancers had a lower BMD compared to an age-matched reference population (mean Z-score -0.9; SD 0.5), with 7 out of 15 having Z-score <-1. Overall, absolute BMD values were highest in the legs, followed by spine and arms. Dancers with Z-score <-1 had a significantly lower total mass. 43% of female ballet dancers had not yet had their first period and 39% had oligomenorrhea, but no significant differences between groups was detected. A third of adolescent elite ballet dancers had low to very low Z-score. Nearly 2 out of 3 dancers with a Z-score <-1 were males, showing that low BMD is not limited to female dancers. Among female dancers menstrual dysfunction was frequent, without apparent impact on BMD or body composition in the studied age group.

Body learning: examining the processes of skill learning in dance

This paper was stimulated by the authors' attempt to understand the process of skill learning in dance. Its stimulus was a period of fieldwork based at the Royal Ballet School in London, and subsequent discussions with the school's teachers and with academic colleagues about how it was that the young dancers developed their characteristic set of skills. The paper's focus and method is philosophical, although it draws on empirical data (albeit sparingly) where it is relevant to the discussion. Many accounts of skill learning are premised on the presumption that learners come to know about their environment by representing it in the mind and that such representation is a result of a computational process involving information received through the senses. This is the dominant position of researchers in the field. In this paper, we discuss weaknesses in this information processing theory, and explore the elements of a more satisfactory approach. The account offered here locates dance skills within the context of development, in which skills are incorporated in learners through practice and training in dance environments. Dreyfus' theory of expertise and Bourdieu's theory of practice offer insights into the practical mastery young dancers carry in their bodies, which cannot be accurately formulated in terms of a system of representations. Dancers, from this perspective, do not passively follow instructions, but actively engage in tasks involving characteristic ways of moving that are situated in the nexus of relations between people and the distinctive contexts of dance. The paper suggests that skill learning in dance (or indeed any domain) is not a matter of processing information, but is imminent in the active, perceptual engagement of learner and context.

The Bridge of Aspiration, Covent Garden, London, UK

The Bridge of Aspiration between the Royal Ballet School and the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden comprises an aluminium beam of highly complex geometry and a series of aluminium and timber square frames forming a twisted box arrangement (Fig. 1). This paper describes the design and construction, and addresses the reasons for selecting aluminium as the primary structural material. The innovative design had to deal with several complex issues and permit installation in a single operation to minimise disruption to the function of the Opera House.

The Celluloid Cubicle: Regressive Constructions of Masculinity in 1990s Office Movies

Starstruck British boys under the spell of the film Billy Elliot have made history at the Royal Ballet by outnumbering girls for the first time in its 76-year history, according to Sunday Telegraph. Two years after the story of a miner's son who becomes a ballet dancer hit movie screens, this year's intake at the Royal Ballet's junior and senior schools includes 14 boys and 10 girls, the newspaper said. The film has certainly had some effect on the younger boys, said Gailene Stock, director of the Royal Ballet School. A number of boys at the school have said Billy Elliot made them feel more comfortable about telling people they are ballet dancers. Globe and Mail, 4/16/02 Mike's a junior at Beacon, a public high school; he asked not use his last name. He's a bodybuilder, likes to fight. used to go out I'd pray to get into a fight, he said. They liked Fight Club. Yeah, said James, who's a junior at Horace Mann School, we do shit. Ben and Dara are in Love Vanity Fair 9/01 Kozoll's 1980 script... still veered too close to the truth for any studio's comfort. You have to understand, Kozoll said, that this movie was done in an atmosphere where Warner Bros, said to us, 'Absolutely nobody wants to see a movie about the Vietnam War!' Kozoll finally washed his hands of the project and put it out of his mind. I don't even like war anyway. When Rombo came out, never even saw He would not think of the screenplay again until Halloween of 1985, the year Rombo: First Blood Part II was released. Kozoll lived on a street in Santa Monica was always inundated with trick-or-treatcrs. He opened his door night to a sea of identically dressed monsters. At first thought they were pirates, he said. Then realized, they were They were all Thousands of little Rambos. Susan Faludi Stiffed 1999 (394-395) Film is not just text. It is also cultural practice, and should be approached and studied as such. It is made under specific cultural circumstances, and yet it also influences the circumstances of culture. We allow, even crave, film to speak to us and for us. Even more importantly, film is aware of its influence, or at the very least tends to promote this idea and comment on it. For example: two scenes in Boiler Room (2000) indicate film has taught a generation of young businessmen how to do business. Seth, training at a stock brokerage, is told to remember ABC from Glengarry Glen Ross: Always Be Closing. Later, Seth visits the home of one of his co-workers. He and several other young male traders are watching Wall Street and reciting Gordon Greed is Good Gecko's lines from heart. They have committed his role to memory, and are attempting to live it. In each of the above incidents, boys and young men use film in a very direct way to explain or model their identities, their masculinities. These are males living in a time when their gender is often said to be in crisis, and, as ever, Hollywood has attempted to echo this. feeling. Much has been written on how Hollywood has responded to the contemporary social climate in order to shore up, reinforce, or shape our culture's perception of what it is to be a man. Post-war films tended to emphasize the role of the father at home (think Vincente Minelli's 1950 Father of the Bride) to solidify the traditional family after its disruption (dad at war, mom at the factory). uber-male action films of the 1980s (think Schwarzenegger and Stallone) can be read (and often are) as a corrective response to the feminist boom of the 1970s, or the sagging US economy. In the 1990s, an entirely new genre has come about to reflect the position of the disempowered middle-class white male: the drone of the new corporatized, managerial late capitalist culture. have come to call these films office movies, not because they all take place in an office, but because the films let us know the protagonists are caught in the mid-rungs of an increasingly corporate culture, usually somewhere in the cubicle class. …

Archives of the Dance: The Royal Ballet School Archives

The Royal Ballet School's museum and archives were initiated when the Sadler's Wells Ballet School acquired White Lodge, in Richmond Park, as its home in 1955. A new studio the Pavlova studio was added to the house in that year, built with funds donated by Victor Dandre, as a memorial to Anna Pavlova. From October 1956, when the Sadler's Wells organisation was granted a Royal Charter and became the Royal Ballet, items were bequeathed or loaned to White Lodge, including Cyril Beaumont's gift of a costume sketch and wig for Anna Pavlova in

Orthopaedists Aid Ballet

Consultant Orthopaedic Surgeon, Central Middlesex Hospital; Orthopaedic Surgeon to Royal Ballet Company and School, and Surrey County Cricket Club.