Keeping Up With Juliette

Hello everybody and welcome back to another blog post, Today, I'm going to be updating you on all the things that I'm currently doing in dance, as part of a mini dance diary entry. I hope you enjoy!🙂💜 As I've mentioned last Saturday, I'm now doing weekly street dance classes with a girl called Ivy, who joined my Easter and February half term street dance workshops that I hosted as part of my fundraising for Tanzania. We began the sessions on Tuesday this week at 4:30pm and it was a really fun hour-long session. I did a warm up and a cool down and I included some elements of technique in the class; we worked on our splits and general flexibility. Just some more in depth dance elements that I thought would really improve her performance. I also taught a new routine to the song Now or Later by Sage the Gemini. It was really challenging because it was really fast and quite technical but I think Ivy really enjoyed it nevertheless. I'm glad I get to work with her on her...

Hello everybody and welcome back to another blog post, As I mentioned last week, I asked one of the girls who joined my last two holiday virtual street dance classes, to see if she wanted to take a class with me every week. Her mum emailed me back saying that she was actually going to ask me to teach her daughter every week but I beat her to it, so I guess that's a good sign. This means that starting from Tuesday at 4:30pm, I will be teaching street dance as a weekly class on Zoom and I'm really excited.  I will be charging £4/hour for each class like last time, just as an introductory sum of money, but that will probably go up slightly later on if the classes are successful. It's still a good way for me to fundraise for my Tanzania trip next year and it will still help to contribute to my final sum of money. Since these classes will be more of an official thing, rather than just a casual workshop session, I'm hoping to do more than just teach new routines each lesson. ...

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, 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, I feel like Strictly has a real Christmas atmosphere to it so I thought that I would make my reviews a part of Blogmas. Enjoy! I'm really happy that Harvey got a perfect score for his couple's choice routine last Saturday. In most circumstances, the celebrity dancers want to get a perfect score and so they kind of expect it to happen. However, this came to the surprise of Harvey and I truly think that he deserved it because he worked hard and really executed the dance well. Like Craig, I wasn't thinking too much about the dance itself because I was just enjoying watching it in the moment. I really liked the choreography that Janette did because it was a nice mixture between contemporary and street commercial and it really suited Harvey's style well. What I really liked about the dance also were the lifts. At the beginning of Strictly, Harvey was really nervous to do lifts because he felt like he wasn't going to ...

Hello everybody and welcome back to another blog post,  I think that there were so many amazing dances performed last Saturday on Strictly. I was really impressed by how much everyone had improved since the beginn ing and I think that we can really start to see who has advanced in their level of dance. Today, however, I'm going to be talking about Ranvir and Giovanni's first Argentine tango of the 2020 series as well as Jamie and Karen's amazing street commercial routine. I think that these two dancers have really improved from the beginning and I would love to highlight that today. I was really impressed by Ranvir's execution of the Argentine tango. It was really a superb effort. She kept her performance dramatic through her facial expressions and she really tried to remain as close to Giovanni as possible. I also really liked how still she remained in her lifts and I think that that really enhanced the execution. What I thought she could improve on for next time was k...

  Hello everybody and welcome back to another blog post,  Today I'm going to be talking all about ZooNation and Kate Prince, in continuation with this series. Now, I've actually done a lot of research on Kate Prince's life and the ZooNation dance company when I was completing part of my coursework for BTEC dance. As I found out more about Kate and her company, I felt inspired to tell you guys about her since she isn't very well known and through what she's done, she has changed the way we look at dance and therefore deserves to be talked about today. I hope you enjoy reading about her story and the life of ZooNation! It's really interesting. Kate Prince was born in 1974 in Southampton. She is the founder and artistic director of ZooNation: The Kate Prince Company, an urban, contemporary, and hip hop specialised dance company, based in London. Kate has choreographed many pieces in her own musicals and has a real eye for creative, new, and raw talent. One of her p...

Hello everybody and welcome back to another blog post,  If you're a dancer, you'll understand how pricey dance shoes can get. In any style of dance really: ballet, jazz, tap, and street, the shoes you'll need are expensive. My black dance trainers that I use for street, cost around £30 and my  black dance shoes that I use for ballroom and Latin cost around £50. The previous pair of ballroom shoes that I wore when I started classes were sparkly, silver Freed's and although they were definitely really pretty, they were also really expensive and cost around £40-£50 so there is no doubt that dance shoes can make you spill your money a bit.  However, there is often a reason for this and hopefully you'll find the right pairs of shoes for you, that will fit your price range as best as possible. The other day, I was watching a video made by Freed of London, on how they make their dance shoes. All I can say is, the whole procedure is incredibly extensive.  Unlike other dance...

Hello everybody and welcome back to another blog post,  In today's all about:_____ post, I'll be talking about the incredibly well-known British street dance group, Diversity! I have talked about this group a little bit before but here I'll be talking about their full story and how they changed dance so if that is something you want to see, then please keep on reading. Originally known as Swift Moves, Diversity is a dance group that was formed in 2007 and it includes four sets of siblings and eight other members from London and Essex. They rose to fame through their Britain's Got Talent audition in 2009, where they impressed the judges with an original and slightly comedic, street dance number. Although the number was really impressive and included dare-devil tricks and excellent choreography for the time, all the members had very little formal dance training and just enjoyed practicing dance in their spare time. The group's founder, Ashley Banjo, was even in the mi...

Hello everybody and welcome back to another blog post, I hope you're all still doing well during quarantine! It's the second post of my "All about____" series, where I talk about the dancers, choreographers, and people who have changed the way we look at dance. Last week, I talked about the Burn the Floor Dance Company so if you haven't read that already, I suggest you do because it's really interesting. You can find the link to it here . However, today I'm going to be talking about the amazing South Korean dance studio, 1 Million Dance Studio! 1 Million Dance Studio is an innovative dance center that was co-founded by Lia Kim and Timon Youn, on the 1st of December, 2014. Lia Kim is well known for her insane tutting skills and for her appearances at Urban Dance Camp and Kurt Hugo Schneider's music video to Closer, by the Chainsmokers. Whilst Timon Youn is not a dancer himself, he is very much responsible for the videography for 1 Million Dance Studio...

Hello everybody and welcome back to another blog post,  Yes, if you haven't already figured it out, I'm writing this post on a bit of a whim. Every time there's an international or national day of anything, A)I always end up missing it and B) I tend not to care that much about it anyway. When it comes to celebrations like International Women's Day or National Siblings Day, it's not that I don't care about women's rights or I've just completely forgotten about my sister but I'm just one of those people who believes that these sorts of things should be celebrated everyday. I'm not one of those people who understands why you need to have a specific day to remember these things. You're probably wondering why I'm then making a post about International Dance Day. Well, I still think it's a bit rubbish to have just a S-P-E-C-I-F-I-C day to celebrate dance, when dancers celebrate it every time they dance. However, scrolling through Instagra...

Hello everybody and welcome back to another blog post,  There's a common misconception that in order to become a great dancer, you have to start your training at a very young age. Whilst this definitely makes it easier to ensure that you're an advanced dancer later in your training, like many other things, it's not impossible to be something great starting a little later. Many dancers who do start late, are often self-taught and in my opinion, they can often be more outgoing than the trained dancers you see. This is mostly because self-taught dancers have to work a little harder to get noticed, whilst trained dancers have been introduced to the dance setting ever since they were young. One famous self-taught dancer is Matt Steffanina, who began teaching himself how to dance at 13 years old and now has a successful YouTube channel, where he showcases his dances. To me, dancers like him show that anything is possible, if you've got the right mindset and work ethic. I al...

Hello everybody and welcome back to another blog post,  I know that there are some schools who offer online materials like live follow-along sessions, in order to keep dancers on track and to provide people with routine and structure in their daily lives. My studio are installing purchasable online videos from our instructors, for people to use if they would like to continue practising during quarantine. However, with our amazing advances in technology, it's easy to remain on track in other ways. A quick search on YouTube will provide you with all the resources you need. Popular YouTubers like Claudia Dean and Anna McNulty post many follow-along stretching routines and dance exercises. I'm not ballet trained but I like doing some of Claudia Dean's barre exercises, as she offers them at many different levels (beginners,intermediate,and advanced). It's a good opportunity for me to get better at something that I don't usually do and it's only going to better my d...