For some of the least expensive, good dance entertainment in Kansas City the University of Missouri Kansas City's
Conservatory of Dance and Music's Dance Division offers some of the best young adult dancers in the area.
UMKC's Dance Division is among the top dance schools in the country. Those of us who live in this area often miss that distinction but people elsewhere know (isn't it always so?).
Each year's entering classes just keep getting better as the incoming talent keeps inching upward in ability. Some of the students are fed into the system by local studios and some are from national and even international recruiting by the dance staff.
Although this web site is a journalistic effort to show dance in Kansas City, and is not intended as a booster of anyone in particular, the pages listed above are referenced by students considering attending the Dance Division.
The students in the program are intense. They are not just talented, they are hard working, very focused and very competitive in a way that shows competition is cooperative. I've watched them truly support each other. As an adjunct, I have a computer class with a lot of these highly disciplined young people. They are very sharp. (As are athletes in the athletic program, and for many of the same reasons as the dancers. I get those "kids" in my classes too and they really focus hard because they are gone a lot as well.)
This focusing skill among dancers has seemed far more obvious in the last couple of years since Twitter and other web media have produced an adapted audience with short attention spans whose questions show that they skip and skim material rather than read throughly.
Although I've no way of testing it, I don't think there are any more Einsteins or Not-Einsteins among dancers than among anyone else. However, I am more convinced than ever that the practice of dance develops the ability to focus intently as a result of two things, 1) the need to quickly and efficiently make up for time away from classes in rehearsals and performances (something shared with our athletic-program students) and 2) the need to remember precisely so many details and variations in choreography and be able to modify program details in a snap. That is a terribly valuable tool for all walks of life.
The dancers have to be sharp, partly because so much of their non-class time is spent in rehearsals, performances and their own works (i.e. senior recitals) not only for shows at UMKC, but also locally in Kansas City where they form a part of the talent pool. Many of those rehearsal schedules are on weekends and late into the nights. Sometimes they can be in 40 or more hours of rehearsal a week - that is time outside of class, job, transportation and so forth. It varies greatly but it is seldom light.
I would also call dancers athletes but I hate to, not because they are not athletes but because such statements tend to sound more like an excuse for dance to be tolerated as legit. I think the comparison of dancers and athletes should be more like a multiple of the famous Ginger and Fred comparison which states that she does all the stuff Fred does, but in high heels and backward too.
Dancers don't just move a ball to a goal (so to speak) but they have to do it in character, smiling, with grace and technique specific to the art form, never letting down and never stopping, on beat, keeping count, and repeating exactly the same moves to the same music again and again (you should see some of my comparison videos of separate runs), no mistakes. No cut on traditionally-defined athletes (football, baseball, etc.) and not that there is not tremendous grace in the result, but they get to grunt, groan and grimace with bodies twisted and turned any which way just as long as the ball gets to the goal.
In my personal experience with these "kids," these dancers are talented as both physical athletes and mental athletes. Then there is the thing about what great people they are, but that is another rant. Don't get me started. |
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