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Move Over Girls, and Make Space for Ballet for Boys

DANCE is for EVERYONE!

When did people begin to dance? No one knows for sure, but dancing has been around for as long as there have been people!

Dancing provides people with a wonderful tool to express their emotions and thoughts. They can communicate to others what they are feeling and their state of mind. Dancing connect people. All around the world, there is dance. Over many centuries, every country and culture has developed typical dances of its own. They are part of peoples’ traditions.

Aside from these cultural dances, dance developed for performance.

People have always passed on their old dances from generation to generation and always enjoyed dancing them. In addition there were also modifications, changes, new steps and other dance moves. More dances evolved.

We will, in this series of articles, look at the different styles of dance and find out how you can get involved. We shall start with BALLET and ask the question ‘Is ballet for boys too?’

What is ballet?

Ballet was created in the courts of Italian princes about 500 years old. A royal dance school was later founded in France by Louis XIV in 1661.

Many positive benefits are associated with learning the art of ballet. Besides learning the traditional techniques of ballet, ballet lessons can also nurture a positive self image. Ballet teaches skill, grace, poise, self-discipline and confidence. If your dream is to become a dancer, you must practice a lot in order to master the many challenging poses and steps of ballet. You will begin by learning the rules and traditional techniques of ballet.

Why should I learn Ballet?

Ballet lessons have three major benefits. First of all, a dancer expands their vocabulary through learning the French names of the steps and hearing the musical terms. Secondly, they develop their musicality and rhythm through coordinating their bodies to the music. A third benefit is that memorising new steps and dances improves the memory of young ballet students.

So, Ballet makes you smart!

Dance offers a greater range of motion, coordination, endurance and strength than most other physical activities. If you have an interest in any kind of future in dance, you’ll need ballet because that’s where you learn the basics. But even if dance isn’t the ultimate goal, ballet lessons improve posture, flexibility, coordination, strength and grace. They also provide an opportunity for you to be active regardless of the weather outdoors.

So, Ballet makes you fit and strong! This IS looking promising.

Ballet lessons can also be good for a kid’s development by improving their social skills. It’s been suggested that ballet classes encourage kids to form new friendships. Dancers also get to interact with positive role models in their dance teachers. In ballet class, you need to follow directions closely and discipline yourself to not run around the space of the dance studio! Your confidence will grow as you develop new skills and perform in front of an audience. My dancers love to perform for their friends and family. After working hard all year, my students feel a sense of accomplishment while performing on stage in awesome costumes.

So, Ballet can make you a more confident person! What’s not to like?!

Is Ballet just for girls…? No, definitely not! More girls than boys do ballet, but the ballet that girls do is very different from ballet for men and boys. Male ballet dancers have to be strong and athletic. When scientists tested male ballet dancers against sportsmen, they found that the dancers were fitter and able to keep going for longer. Lots of sports clubs invite Ballet teachers in sometimes to give the players a lesson! It’s great for their balance, agility and core strength.

So, Ballet is great for boys too! Sign me up.

Naomi is an AISTD trained dance teacher, has been teaching since 1994. As well as a long career in dance schools, she has also been Head of Dance in a sixth form college. She runs a small, encouraging dance school offering classes for children and young adults in Ballet, Tap, Jazz and Linedancing, as well as Dancing Hands which uses songs and signing to introduce Ballet to pre-school dancers. The school is based in Bassingbourn and Litlington, on the border of South Cambridgeshire and North Hertfordshire, UK. Naomi has a particular love for working with children and young adults who have learning difficulties – dance is for everybody! Find out more on www.dance-matters.co.uk

Art & History

Great Women You Should Know: Betty Skelton

In our series of Great Women You Should Know … here comes daredevil and adventurer Betty Skelton

When she was eight, Betty fell in love with aeroplanes. She watched them flying over her house every day, she devoured books about them, and she begged her parents to take her to airfields where she would persuade pilots to take her on rides above the clouds.

Betty must have been a very persuasive person, because she also talked a young Navy pilot into giving the whole family flying lessons. And when I say whole family, I mean it: Betty flew her first plane solo when she was just twelve years old. She might have been a tiny daredevil, but she was so scared her mother would scold her for doing it that she kept it a secret for a week!

Popular, Science, Nature and Tech

What is Biotechnology?

Perhaps you have heard of the term biotechnology and wondered what it is. You may think you know already – after all, the parts that make up the word are very familiar: bio + technology. You have seen the first part of the word in biology, antibiotics, all sorts of words. It comes from Greek bios, which means ‘life’.

As for technology, it is not just about computers and smartphones. Technology is the practical use of knowledge to create useful things and solve problems. You might like to think of it as tech-knowledge-y. So, taking it one step further, biotechnology is about using biology in technology.

We talked to Alessandra Iscaro, a biotechnology researcher at the University of Florence, Italy, and she explained to us what it is all about.

News & Politics

What is a Referendum?

There has been a lot of talk recently about the referendum on membership of the European Union. It seems that we cannot turn on the television without hearing about it! But what is a referendum?

A referendum is a vote, not an election by which we choose the people to represent us, but a choice in which all the people who can vote are asked to accept or reject (not accept) a course of action.

You can find out more about our main election, the General Election here.

What this means is that voters are called to say yes or no to a question. You might think that this sounds perfectly reasonable; why shouldn’t everyone have a say in what our country is doing? But it is not as simple as that.

Most questions are decided by votes in Parliament; after all, this is why we elect them to represent us, and in practical terms, we cannot all expect to be experts on all the subjects that must be covered by the government. So this doesn’t happen very often.

Referendums in the UK

In fact, in the UK there have only been twelve, yes, just 12 referendums since 1973. Twelve referendums over the course of 43 years, of which only two have covered the entire country. You can see that this is not a large number.

You might be surprised to learn that the first to cover the whole country was in 1975, and it was on membership of the European Economic Community (EEC), which is what the European Union was then known as. The second was in 2011, and related to a reform in the voting system known as Alternative Vote.

All the other major referendums in the UK have been related to questions of devolving power – or the governing of the distinct regions of England, Wales Scotland and Northern Ireland.

Origins of the Word Referendum

The word came into use in English in 1847. But at that time, it was mostly about Switzerland, whose system of direct democracy involved (and continues to involve) a large number of referendums. The word was coined, or created, from Latin referendum, which means “thing to be referred”. This is because, in a referendum, the decision is referred to the people.

The word referendum in Latin is from the verb referre. This verb means “to bring back, to take back’, which is the very essence of a referendum: a question is being brought back to the people who will be affected by it.

What is the Plural of Referendum?

A lot of people think that the plural of referendum is ‘referenda’, but is it really?

[perfectpullquote align=”full” bordertop=”false” cite=”The Oxford English Dictionary” link=”” color=”” class=”” size=””]Referendum is logically preferable as a plural form meaning ballots on one issue (as a Latin gerund referendum has no plural). The Latin plural gerundive referenda, meaning ‘things to be referred’, necessarily connotes a plurality of issues.[/perfectpullquote]

What does that mean?

A gerund is a grammar term used in Latin and other languages. In Latin, ‘referenda’ would mean ‘more than one thing to be considered’, whereas a referendum as a vote tends to be on one single issue.

We can use ‘referendum’ as a plural if we wish, but ‘referendums’ has also become normalised in English, as the word has been accepted in popular use in English, and of course the usual way to make a plural in English is to add ‘s’.

You can find out more about the British political system in these posts.