About Our Adult Ballet Classes Adelaide
Ballet is a fun and challenging dance form that combines grace, technique, and artistic expression. Dragonfly Dance offers adult ballet classes for all skill levels, including beginners. Through ballet, you'll improve strength, flexibility, posture, balance, and coordination. It serves as a foundation for other dance styles and offers a unique body training system. Regular ballet training enhances physical and mental aspects, such as mindfulness, proprioception, memory, processing, coordination, and brain function.
Ballet is often accompanied by solo piano music, ranging from orchestral adaptations to pop songs or musical hits. Ballet dance classes at Dragonfly Dance may also incorporate non-ballet genres like jazz, rock, pop, or blues.
While ballet uses French terminology, teachers at Dragonfly Dance ensure that English versions are used and help students become familiar with the terminology and movements.
Benefits of Ballet Classes for Adults
There are many benefits to doing ballet as an adult, both physical and mental. Here are a few reasons why:
Ballet Classes for Everyone
Ballet is a wonderful form of exercise and creativity for anyone, including adults of various ages, fitness level, shapes and sizes.
You can enjoy adult ballet classes in Adelaide at Dragonfly Dance as a regular activity simply for your own enjoyment, as a way to exercise that keeps your mind and heart engaged as well, or you may even want to progress towards performance.
Adult Ballet Classes in Adelaide
At Dragonfly Dance, we offer adult ballet technique classes, pre-pointe and pointe, ballet repertoire and Progressing Ballet Technique.
Technique classes
A ballet technique class is usually divided into two parts. The first part is the barre, where you will gradually warm up your body, as well as practice various movements that build a solid foundation for the dancing you’ll do in the centre section of the class. The second half of the class is conducted away from the barre, and is called the ‘centre section’. In this section you practice arm movements (port de bras), slow and sustained movements for balance and control (adage), various types of turns (including pirouettes), various types of jumps (called ‘allegro’, including small jumps to warm up and strengthen your legs and feet (petit allegro), medium size jumps, and bigger, travelling jumps (grand allegro) and various types of waltzing movements. The movements are put together into combinations (called enchainment) that are like short dances.
Ballet barre
We offer standard technique classes, as well as Ballet Barre, which is basically the barre section of the class for a full hour instead of just half an hour. A lot of people enjoy barre because it gives you a chance to focus on technique and conditioning, the barre is always there to help you balance. It is not like a ‘barre’ class in the fitness industry, which doesn’t tend to include many actual ballet movements. Instead, our ballet barre includes all the beautiful music, fluidity, and grace of ballet, along with a focus on improving your ballet technique.
Pre-pointe and pointe classes
One of the hallmarks of ballet is that the dancers wear pointe shoes that help them to rise up onto the tips of their toes. But the shoes by themselves are not enough. To dance en pointe you need to develop your technique, strength, and control in your core, turn out muscles, legs, ankles, and feet. We do not require dancers to dance en pointe in our regular technique classes. But if you do have the dream of dancing en pointe, our prepointe and pointe classes can help you get there. Prepointe is the class you do before you are ready for pointe shoes, which helps you to develop and strength and control needed for pointe. In the pointe class, you develop your ability to dance in pointe shoes, which is a lot harder than it looks, but it is incredibly rewarding.
Ballet repertoire
In a ballet repertoire class, you have the opportunity to learn well-known ballet dances. Usually, these are specific pieces from the classical, neo-classical or contemporary ballet repertoire, such as Swan Lake, The Nutcracker, Giselle, Sleeping Beauty, and other famous ballets.
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You may learn a solo variation (that is a solo dance from a ballet, such as the Sugarplum Fairy from the Nutcracker, the White Swan from Swan Lake), a duo (pas de deux), trio (pas de trois), quartet (pas de quatre), or other group dances (corp de ballet dances).
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You learn the choreography, but you also have the chance to refine your technique, artistry and stage presence. In other words, you get to put everything you learnt in technique class into practice. You’ll also develop a deeper knowledge of ballet repertoire and history.
Progressing Ballet Technique
Progressing Ballet Technique (PBT) is a body conditioning system developed by Marie Walton-Mahon OAM to help ballet dancers improve their ballet technique. PBT can also help dancers in other styles, like adult jazz dance and contemporary, improve their technique as well.
PBT trains you to develop core strength, weight placement, and alignment with a gradual approach of carefully designed exercises and repetitions of these exercises that trigger their muscle memory. The program is designed with safe dance methodology to keep you dancing longer.
It is now being taught by over 4000+ certified teachers worldwide and over 3500 schools globally have added PBT classes in their curriculum for students. Soon, it will be taught at Dragonfly Dance in Adelaide.
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You can read more about the benefits of Progressing Ballet Technique on our blog.