Keeping Up With Juliette

Hello everybody and welcome back to another blog post, As many of you already know, recently I joined the Cambridge Youth Dance Senior Company and I have now been taking classes with the group every Tuesday evenings since I joined in September. So far, everything is going well. We are set to perform at the Energise Dance Festival on the 4th of February next year so we have all worked together to come up with choreography for a 4 minute piece that we are creating for the show.  However, during the October half term, we also went to see the production Alice, performed by the professional dancers from the Jasmin Vardimon Company at the Sadlers Wells Theatre in London. The performance was spectacular and much of our inspiration for our own 4 minute routine, came from what we saw at the Sadlers Wells Theatre. The production was loosely based on the classic Alice in the Wonderland tale and the show combined props, costuming, and innovative choreography to tell a story of Alice coming of ...

Hello everybody and welcome back to another blog post,  Recently, me, my mum, and my sister Alice have all been sitting down every Saturday night to watch the latest episodes of Strictly Come Dancing 2022. It has been a long-standing tradition of ours since me and Alice were very young, to watch a bit of Strictly and for many years it has brought us a lot of joy to watch our favourite celebrities transform themselves from complete novices to experienced dancers. However, more recently, I guess we haven't been enjoying the series as much as we used to. It feels a bit of a shame for me to say this because I know how much Strictly Come Dancing has provided a platform for Ballroom and Latin dancing to become more widely recognised by the general public and I do believe that it is actually because of the show that these dance styles have become less associated with the older generation and now highly loved by the youth. This was a subject that I actually explored in more detail in my IB...

Hello everybody and welcome back to another blog post,  Last week on Tuesday, I went to an audition for Cambridge Youth Dance Company at Impington Village College. A few months ago now, before the summer, I went to the taster session for Cambridge Youth Dance Company so that I could get a better understanding of what the company sessions were going to be like. You can read all about my experience here if you missed the post. If you don't know about CYDC, it's a small company run by Kate Durrant that holds contemporary dance classes, guest workshops, and theatre trips for all of its members. In the that post I put up before the summer, I wrote about how I wasn't sure if I was going to do the audition or not because at the time, I wasn't sure if the company was for me. However, since then I began to think that I should give it a go anyway because it might be a good opportunity for me to perform in different places and get some good mentoring along the way. Plus, Kate kin...

Hello everybody and welcome back to another blog post,  Today, I'll be posting my IB extended essay that I did on the subject of dance. In this essay, I explore how Strictly Come Dancing has helped to disseminate Ballroom and Latin dance, a previously regarded old style of dance, amongst the younger generation and how that's led to the continuity of this dance style in the modern day. This essay took me a long time to write because it focused on a very unique topic that has not really been talked about or approached before in the academic sense. Most of my friends and peers did their extended essays on subjects such as English and history, which were classic subjects for the extended essay. However, I was selected to do mine on dance and for a long time I doubted if I could write an essay that would be of the same quality as the others. Over the months, there were drafts and redrafts and paragraphs written and rewritten, as well as many meetings held with my supervisor, but eve...