Giving students, teachers, and parents an edge in dance education
With its STEEZ portable audio system (or “boombox”) Pioneer is revitalizing a breed of music player that seems nearly extinct, yet still has use and meaning in the dance community. Storing your digital music in 4GB of memory this line offers dance-specific features like tempo control, music cues, and dance battle mode. Dance Advantage reviews the mid-sized Duo model.
I know it’s Halloween weekend but with so much to do, it can’t hurt to think ahead to the holidays. If you need music, choreography, or class activities, we’ve got you covered. The ghosts of Christmases Past and Present can even point you to some gift ideas for dancers and dance teachers!
Patience Clements is the company pianist for Charleston Ballet Theatre and has been accompanying dance classes for over 30 years. In this post, Dance Advantage reviews 2 of her 4-disc series, New Piano Music for Ballet Class. If you’re looking for original melodies with lots of variety for your classes, try New Piano Music for the Dedicated Dancer (with Susan Jaffe) and for the Young Dancer.
Dance teachers, have you ever had a great piece of music, but for some reason, your dancers’ timing just always seemed to be a little off? Armed with an iPod Touch or an iPhone, and an application (app) that costs less than $5, you can dial in the perfect tempo, matching your routines to your dancers’ ideal pacing.
“Raising Happiness” is a parenting book but Stacey Pepper Schwartz shows that teachers can take away some of its lessons, too. For example, how to effectively recognize achievement, model optimism, convey positive messages, create a joyful atmosphere, resolve conflict, and promote gratitude among your young students.
Squirrel Trench Audio, offering music editing and original remixes for dance, would like to give away one editing session of a single song to dance competition/recital length to THREE different Dance Advantage readers. Squirrel Trench Audio will make the edited song available online for winners to download in both high quality mp3 format, as well as aiff for highest quality when burning to CD. Since the finished product will be made available for downloading, our winners can be located anywhere.
A review of Vagnova Ballet Academy’s Character Dance Class DVD (availability courtesy KineticFlix.com). Plus, additional resources for teachers on DVD and CD and more articles and blog posts to help you “get into Character”.
Jason Marquette returns with more tips as you prepare music for recitals and competition. This time he helps you save time, money, and frustration when hiring someone to edit your music.
Dance Teacher, Choreographer, and Music Editor Jason Marquette shares how to choose the right song for your choreography and offers in-depth tips on editing music with readily available software.
You may think you’ve heard every version of Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker Suite available. The holiday classic has been covered many times. You won’t find any dog barking in this collection but I’m sure you’ll find something new to add a bit of sugarplum, spice, or humor to your classes or parties this holiday season.
This year I’ve topped that with 40 MORE songs that you can use for parties or for dance class. Go way beyond the Monster Mash with tracks from True Blood, The Ramones, David Bowie, and Kanye West.
The studio I work at has three studios – one large and two small — as well as a small theatre space that seats about 100 people. The two smaller studios and the theatre space have an upright acoustic piano, and the larger studio has a baby grand piano. I actually prefer to play on the upright acoustic pianos as I find their tone more appealing – not to mention the fact that I can get more emotion out of these pianos!
