Thursdays
16.00-16.40 Infant & Preliminary Contemporary (Ages 4-8)
16.40-17.30 Grade One & Two Contemporary (Ages 9-12)
18.00-19.00 Grade Three & Four Contemporary (Ages 13-16)
Contemporary Dance is the UK’s fastest growing art form. More than 4.8 million people regularly attend community dance groups each year in England alone.
Contemporary is great for maintaining strong bones, improving posture and muscle strength, increasing balance and co-ordination and beating stress.
Contemporary Dance is still a relativity new style and involves lots of floor work and leaps. It is also a style that expresses itself through emotion and can be quite dramatic!
The syllabus taught for this genre is NATD (National Association for Teacher’s of Dancing). Students have the opportunity to progress through their grades and eventually these can contribute to UCAS points for university!
These don’t start till grade one, where other genres start at Infant, progress to preliminary then one, two, three, four, five etc.
Since this isn’t an option for Contemporary, our students use this time to take part in the Rainbow awards set out by NATD. The young students submit a dance for each colour of the rainbow and will eventual have the full trophy along with a gold medal on completion!
Once the students reach 8/9 They are eligible for taking their grades. Exams are not mandatory at PDS but they are an excellent opportunity for students to get recognition for their hard work and progression.
If students do not wish to take their exams it is promoted that they remain in their graded class till they would be ready to take the exam as this makes it fair for all other students and means they will be ready for the grade above.
We also use International Dance Rewards within our lessons. Since exam progress can take a minimum of a year of hard work it’s nice to have little rewards throughout the year to remind the students how hard they have been working and to reinforce their motivation.
Once students join the school they will be assigned a reward sheet and in classes we work hard on ticking off all the goals. We attempt to get the students to complete a colour every half term. The young sheets have six colours – Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue & Purple. The sheets for older dancers are just Orange, Green & Purple.
Once the reward sheet is completed the students are able to take them home. If parents wish they can also purchase certificates and badges for an additional £5.00
Pickup Dance Southampton 