Playing for ballet class tips #12: have a repertoire of weird stuff
Repertoire for ballet class: the problem of threes A ballet teacher friend asked me a question at a party about an exercise that he’d set in a class that day…
Jonathan Still, ballet pianist
Music, dance, IT, trivia. Not necessarily in that order.
Repertoire for ballet class: the problem of threes A ballet teacher friend asked me a question at a party about an exercise that he’d set in a class that day…
Playing for class without music on the stand is a totally different experience to working from a score. Only when you put the music away do you realise how much…
I always used to think how amazing it is the way that dancers pick up exercises so quickly: a teacher rattles through a list of steps in ballet shorthand, says…
Even though teachers often ask for a ‘waltz’ for pirouettes on a 3, sometimes (in fact, most times) what works much better is a mazurka. Not the character-type mazurka that…
If I had one golden rule for playing for class, this would be it: you can get people to listen to anything if you set them up the right way.…
One of the occupational hazards of playing for class too much is that you can end up playing in a way that only uses three fingers in each hand. After…