Keeping Up With Juliette

Hello everybody and welcome back to another blog post, I feel like I'm saying this a lot but apologies for not posting on Wednesday. There's just been a lot of sad things happening this week in general and in my personal life and finding the time to post has just not been on my radar. I will talk all about it in my next post but for now, I just wanted to post something fun for Dance Saturday. A question that has popped up a lot in my mind recently is, can ice-skating be considered as a style of dance? Personally, I think it can. I've been watching a lot of figure skaters on YouTube and Instagram recently and I've just been completely in awe of their talent. How one can just do an axel and barrel roll on bladed shoes on slippery ice just amazes me. I would say that I've grown to become a better skater because I've done it often enough with my friends and my family that I've gained a decent balance on the ice but there was one time when I was skating on Jesus

Hello everybody and welcome back to another blog post,  Recently, me and my sister have begun to start cooking on Saturdays. Now, if you don't already know me, I should probably tell you that my mum is a pretty great cook. The main reason why my family rarely has takeaways is because my mum cooks almost everyday and to her credit, that's really amazing because she also runs her own cooking and baking business on top of that. This is why when a lot of parents say that they don't have the time to cook on most nights for their children, I don't really believe them because if my mum can do it, I can't really see why anyone else can't. Not that I don't love the odd takeaway dinner from time to time because, especially during the first big lockdown over the summer, me and my family definitely took advantage of all the great food that was on offer in order to celebrate my birthday, as well as mine and my sister's results on GCSE and A-level results day. However

Hello everybody and welcome back to another blog post, Today, I'm going to be talking about my experiences so far with working as a support worker for Project 21.  Before I get onto this post, if you haven't heard about the story so far regarding the Tanzania project, then I would encourage you to click on the My Trip To Tanzania label at the bottom of this post to get up to speed. However, if you haven't already heard, I will also just briefly explain. Basically, I'm planning on going to Tanzania in the summer of 2022 in order to complete the enrichment part of my IB course and to support vital elephant conservation work that is currently going on in the area so in order to do that, I need to raise money. Part of my plan to raise money was to work as support worker at Project 21, a musical theatre group that supports people with Down's Syndrome. I was going to get paid £8/hour for my work with the group, but my plan was put on hold when the 3rd UK lockdown came abo

Hello everybody and welcome back to another blog post,  Everybody has their strengths and their weaknesses and I think that one of my weaknesses might just be giving presentations. Some people are naturally good at talking and continuing oral explanations without too much hesitation but for me, I have to think for quite a long time about what it is that I'm next going to say, which makes it a little bit awkward when a class is waiting in anticipation for the end of my sentence and it takes about 5 minutes for me to finish it. Of course I'm exaggerating slightly but I am genuinely not ashamed to say that I perhaps find explaining things in words on a page, where I can think about my explanation a bit more, a lot easier than saying something on the spot. However, as with anything in life, you've got to challenge yourself in order to improve and hazard a guess about what IB is full of....Oral examinations! Yay, not my favourite. I'm slowly getting an idea of how to do pres

Hello everybody and welcome back to another blog post, A couple weeks ago I got a migraine. It was a Thursday evening and I had just finished my school work when all of a sudden, my head started to feel a bit weird. I remember looking at my tablet screen as I was writing up another blog post and just squinting slightly at the light coming from it. When I went downstairs to set the table for dinner, that's when I felt my head begin to ache. I ate my food that evening because I was hungry but the pain in my head got progressively worse as I was eating. I had to put a cold glass of water on my head to soothe the pain but even that wasn't working. I also was drinking the water and that wasn't working either. My parents suggested that I sit down whilst they cleaned all the dishes. I literally laid like a bag of potatoes on the sofa in the semi-dark living room, willing my head to stop hurting. I cried a bit because it wouldn't stop hurting. I'm not one not one to jump st

Hello everybody and welcome back to another blog post, Sorry I didn't post on Wednesday. As a sixth form student currently going through the process of online school, I can sometimes find it difficult to balance my college studies with blogging but I'm back now for another fun post.  Recently I watched a video about hip-hop dancers trying ballet and ballet dancers trying hip-hop and I thought that it was super interesting. Brittany and Elise were the two professional ballet dancers in the video whilst Brandon "Beastboi" and Dezmin, "Alpha Jack" were the two hip-hop dancers. Brittany and Elise both started dancing at around the age of 3 years old and have both been in prestigious ballet companies, with Brittany dancing at the English National Ballet and Elise dancing at the American School of Contemporary Ballet. In contrast, Beastboi has been dancing hip-hop for 11 years and owns his own hip-hop company Versa-Style and Beast Camp and Alpha Jack runs his own

Hello everybody and welcome back to another blog post, Today, I'm going to give you an update on how things are currently going in terms of my fundraising for the Tanzania Project. So far, there have been a few changes that arose at the beginning of the 3rd lockdown this month. The good news is that I've begun work at Project 21, the dance group I had an interview with at Ipswich in December. The other good news is that because I got a new tablet over Christmas, I've now erased my old one so that I can sell it second hand and get added money for Tanzania. This will add to my £900 that I've currently saved up.  However, the slightly bad news is that although I'm working at Project 21, I'm not going to get paid for what I do until I enter physical classes with the group after lockdown. This is because Alex, my employer, has had to furlough some staff so she understandably can't afford to have me as a paid worker in this lockdown. I don't even know exactly

Hello everybody and welcome back to another blog post, A couple months ago, during one of my online dance lessons, I watched a dance documentary on the origins of hip hop. It was called Dance Around the World. It starred the famous British street dancers Kymberlee Jay, Maren Ellermann, and Suzette Brisset. It was super interesting and, as a street dancer myself, I found out a lot about hip hop that I didn't know before. I learnt that hip hop was created for dancers to stand up for themselves on the streets of New York, I found out how hard it was for hip hop dancers to make money on the streets, and I learnt a lot about other forms of hip hop like breaking and litefeet. There were unfortunately not any video clips of the documentary on YouTube but I'll link the full Channel 4 version below for you to watch. In the meantime, here are some questions I answered on it. Enjoy reading! What are the origins of the dance culture you have explored?  Hip hop dancing originated from the B

Hello everybody and welcome back to another blog post,  Today I'm going to be talking about the endangered Tasmanian Devil for my TOK journal today. Please visit the second photo on the article in the link as I'll be talking about it today. I hope you find it interesting! Are we paying enough attention to our history? View photo for this journal:  https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/aug/27/the-rocks-remember-the-fight-to-protect-burrup-peninsulas-rock-art I was recently re-watching one of my favourite David Attenborough documentaries, Seven Worlds One Planet, with my sister on a Saturday morning. There were many episodes made covering a range of different countries across the seven continents but the most notable episode, to me, was the one that I watched on Australia with my sister on that Saturday morning. We enjoyed watching the bats quickly skimming the water for a drink, risking the jaws of alligators, as well as the muscular wombat, slowly trudging the snowy moun

Hello everybody and welcome back to another blog post,  Recently, I rewatched one of my favourite movies called I am Sam. It stars the actors Sean Penn (as Sam Dawson), Dakota Fanning (as Lucy Dawson), and Michelle Pfeiffer (as Rita Harrison). I began watching this when I was quite young, around the age of 7 years old. I realise now that that was probably too young because the film was actually rated a 12 but I can't exactly remember my parent's reasoning for allowing me and my sister to watch the film. However, I did know that the storyline was very moving. The basic synopsis of the film is that Sam Dawson, an autistic man working on a small wage at Starbucks, has a child called Lucy with a homeless woman. After Lucy is born, the mother abandons her daughter and leaves Sam to take care of her. Although this seems to be okay at first, with Lucy growing up fast, Sam with the IQ of a 7 year old, can't help Lucy with her school work in the way other parents can. The school bec

Hello everybody and welcome back to another blog post, Today I wanted to talk about quite a sensitive topic but I believe that it's also quite an important topic to talk about. After watching a lot of YouTube videos about dancers talking about the issue surrounding body image in dance, I wanted to give my take on it today. I was inspired by the stories of Kathryn Morgan and Joanne Clifton who have all dealt with body confidence in the past. This isn't something that I've fortunately had to deal with personally but as a person who enjoys dancing her free time, I can understand where some dancers are coming from.  I think that the main thing that dancers really struggle to maintain is balance, especially if they're involved in the competitive side of the industry. I think that it's absolutely important to keep athleticism in mind when you're a competitive and professional dancer. It becomes more difficult to execute some key bits of dance technique when you haven&