Our first Adult Dance Experience (ADE)By Eileen Maddocks The Adult Dance Experience was designed to bring together dancers from all areas of the art and to celebrate adult dancers from all backgrounds. Pilates was the quietest class. The students looked serene and relaxed, but don’t be fooled! Even though lying on the floor, the group led by Laura Savard was working hard. Pilates conditions, stretches, and balances the whole body. Dance, like any other physical activity, can take a toll on the adult body. Pilates works to correct imbalances created in the dance studio and allows dancers the space to reconnect and release, and to avoid future stresses, strains and injuries. Pilates is an essential part of the dance experience, a vital tool in every dancer’s toolkit.
Beating, pounding hip hop music came from the next studio. Rose Bedard was teaching hip hop with a jazz emphasis. Legs moved right and left, front and back, with hip and shoulder movements and arms made swooping around. Even the fingers had specialized roles––straight and splayed for upward thrusts and clutched for inward body bends. Music pounded and bodies writhed and swirled. Dancers moved in amazing beauty and unity. What fun! Back to quiet and controlled hard work. Chatch taught the beginning ballet class with everything carefully explained, starting with standing up straight from feet to head––stand back on the feet (for first position) or out in other positions and pull up from the ankles through the legs. The core starts with the tailbone and continues the lifting process up to the rib cage, and ribs and chest continue the upward momentum but with shoulders rolled back and the neck reaching high. Lift the ears! Wide arm stretches “are not us,” he explained, because joints should not be forced to be what they aren’t. Pliés and tendus, battement jetés, and grand battements. Leaving the barres behind, floorwork began with basic tendus, followed by real dancing with balancés! An adagio with passé developé croisé devant, a la second, and croisé derriére was executed with everyone standing straight and balanced on one foot. Brush up on your high school French! There were undoubtedly some sore bodies the next day! Shelley Ismail taught the intermediate ballet class with the elegance of a former professional dancer, twenty years with Les Grand Ballets of Montreal. The students were all trained ballet dancers and they moved through the barre and floor work with strength, grace, and confidence. And what’s that racket coming from the next studio? Intermediate tap class with Elisa Van Duyne! Incredible combinations were taught using both traditional tap styles and contemporary rhythm tap. Did you know that a group can create a crescending sound and then switch to quiet mode, at least for tap relatively speaking? The group danced with unison, arms moving in balance with the feet. You know tap dancers are in unison when the tap sounds are well synchronized. Exciting. Elisa also taught the class on musical theater jazz, which filled the largest studio with a maximum number of students. Warmup exercises were balletic in motion, and soon she was demonstrating basic jazz steps––step forward and back, step right and left, with “rock.” The music “On Broadway” filled the air as arms and feet moved with gusto. Then struts across the floor. Watch them go! Step-step-pose-hold, then alternate, with that jazz hip and arm thrusts. This easy combo looks even jazzier when done on a diagonal. Done on a diagonal. The highlight was the teaching of modified choreography of Robert Ashford’s dance segment “Show People” from the 2007 Broadway show “Curtains.” Within 15 or 20 minutes, 20 dancers not only mastered the dance steps but assumed many different placements and final poses. Just like on Broadway!  Avi Waring led the class on contemporary dance. After going through basic warmup exercises designed to ground dancer bodies to the floor, the dancers found out why. The ensuing choreography was half done on the floor! Up and down from standing positions to floor ones. Mix and match the body rolls with legs splayed, up on a knee for an arm-shoulder pose, roll back down into fetal crouches followed by full stretches with arms and legs going diagonal, up to standing for a quick kick and spin, back to the floor for a spin ending with both legs up to ceiling supported by the chest, and up again for an arabesque turn, quick foot work, and a landing pose. Just watching was exhausting! But the dancers moved with surprising fluidity, keeping to the musical beats like pros. And if you like the floor, you would have loved the floor dancing with Alison Mathes. She uses the floor like an apparatus for incredible dance and fitness. It takes a lot of strength to dance on the floor. It’s difficult. But there’s an almost infinite variety of floorwork movements to be found there. And at least the dancer doesn’t have to worry about falling! Alison choreographed a dance piece for the floor that everyone enjoyed, and the class was over far too soon. Chatch, the artistic director for Farm to Ballet and Bees & Friends, both productions of Ballet Vermont, presented ballet variations for the barn cat, a new character to be introduced during the forthcoming fifth season of Farm to Ballet. Based on the dance of the Queen of the Dryads from Don Quixote, the movements are long, stretchy, and sinuous. We’ll see what the barn cat does with that! Just when life seems cozy with the sun shining warmly on his fur, the cat sees something. A mouse or that rude goat? The cat leaps into quick jumps and turns, changing directions. No rest for you, dear cat, until the nuisance is taken care of and you can return to your lithe, twisty motions. The students had a lot of fun with this. Dancers praised the ADE.
Here’s a great article on Ballet Vermont. https://www.sevendaysvt.com/vermont/new-pro-company-ballet-vt-makes-an-entrance/Content?oid=8493295 And here are the online URLs where you can learn more about the teachers and where they teach. Alison Mathes https://polefitvt.com/about/ Avi Waring https://www.balletvermont.org/meet-the-dancers-2018.html Chatch Pregger https://www.balletvermont.org/meet-the-dancers-2018.html Elisa Van Duyne http://www.elisavanduyne.com/ Laura Savard https://www.allwellnessvt.com/mission/ Rose Bedard https://www.creativeground.org/profile/rose-j-bedard Shelley Ismail No online information could be found. She danced with the Les Grand Ballets of Montreal, Canada, as a soloist for twenty years and has been teaching ballet for about thirty years. She teaches several classes per week for teenagers and adults at the Spotlight Vermont studio in South Burlington. 
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AuthorEileen Maddocks returned to ballet when she retired and studies with Chatch Pregger. She performed with Farm to Ballet for four seasons. She is also a writer with her own publishing company that specializes in religious history. Archives
June 2019
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