Parents and Students

The Way It Is With Dance

1. There is much more to dance class than learning steps.
There are intellectual rewards like more focus and concentration, self-discipline and problem solving. Emotional benefits like confidence, commitment, self-respect, joy and exhilaration. Also there are social benefits like responsibility and teamwork. See the "Why Dance" brochure from UnityDance.org for more on this.
2. Progress in dance is individualized, cumulative, exponential, subtle and almost always slow!
3. Success at dance is best pursued by forgetting about being successful in the future and remembering to pay attention to the present.
4. Almost everyone has a talent that can be related to dance; some are very obvious, others are obscure.
Body Kinesthetic talent or intelligence is the most used skill in dance. People born with it have a much easier time learning and executing proper technique and style. However other talent/intelligences can be very useful in dance or related fields like choreography, teaching, dance therapy, physical therapy and dance critique. Some are useful in learning to appreciate watching dance as an audience member.
5. The most important skill we can have that can lead to success in dance is the ability to focus and concentrate our attention. This is absolutely required for dance class but also acquired by participating in dance class.
Even those with kinesthetic awareness will not be successful at dance if they can't focus and concentrate. Paying attention can be learned though.
6. There is always someone in the class who is better than you or there will be soon. There is also almost always someone not as good as you or there soon will be.
7. Dance teachers, choreographers, artistic directors, casting directors and others who make decision about our lives are human too and they make mistakes sometimes.
8. Sometimes it is a mystery how and why some decisions are made by instructors and directors. Most of the time we just have to accept those decisions gracefully.
9. Not everyone can be a star. Some/most never will be. Working cooperatively in a group is, in the long term, more rewarding for the individual and the community.
10. Hard work always, always, always pays off. Sometimes it isn't so obvious what the pay off is!
11. Patience, acceptance and appreciation of others are the next most useful skills in enjoying and succeeding in dance.
12. Almost everything that is true for dance students is also true for their parent/supporters.
13. Dance Moms and Dads sit around and wait a lot. That's just the way it is.
14. Dance Moms and Dads spend a lot of time and money doing things they don't want to because they believe it will be good for their kids.
15. Dance Moms and Dads need to be thanked for their patience and understanding because they usually get very little recognition. It is often the case that their child may be doing all the stuff they never got a chance to do!
16. Finding one's talent in the dance classroom is going to be very useful to most people in the job market of tomorrow: creativity and artistic understanding is the computer savvy of the future. In an age when routine tasks including computer programming are done by computers and/or outsourced to inexpensive labor markets, creative right brain thinking is going to be absolutely vital to the future.
17. Often we don't get what we want or we get what we don't want. The secret to a lifetime of real happiness is our ability to accept this ultimate truth. After all, it is possible to make tasty lemonade out of lemons if we are not so fixated only on having candy. Practicing acceptance is the key.

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