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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

How To Look At Art

Have you got a favourite painting? Mine is ‘A Portrait of the Countess Golovine’ painted by Elisabeth Vigee-Lebrun, sometime around 1797. It is, unsurprisingly, a portrait of Countess Varvara Nikolaevna Golovine, a talented musician and artist from Russia. Elisabeth and the Countess became great friends and I love the way the Countess is smiling in the portrait, with a red shawl draped around her shoulders and her dark curly hair swept up in behind a scarf. The painting belongs to the Barber Institute of Fine Arts, Birmingham, which is one of my favourite galleries.

I love going to art galleries and looking at paintings, but at first I found it quite a daunting thing to do. Have you ever been to an art gallery and not known where to start? Or heard art critics talking about symbolism, composition and form but not understood? Sometimes looking at art can sound difficult, and talking about it can be a whole other language!

But looking at art doesn’t have to be complicated. Things like symbolism, where objects in paintings are used to represent something that’s happening, like a skull symbolising death, can be important and the composition, or the way things in the painting are arranged, can tell us a lot about the artist and why the painted what they did.

Science, Nature and Tech

How to Be an Inventor

Have you ever thought ‘There MUST be an easier way to do this’? If you have, you are not alone. People around the world invent and re-invent products all the time. Some of them are professional, and inventing is part of their job. Others are just normal people who had a bright idea.

There are many clubs and societies which you can join and learn to invent or develop your curiosity and talent for science and invention. All inventors start somewhere, and most of them start when they are very young. Young people have the best imaginations so if there is something you think is a good idea and you want to try and create, why not join up with other young creative people and work together.

Language & Literature

Shooting stars, Weather, and Rocks falling from the Sky!

What do shooting stars, weather and rocks falling from the sky have in common? Are you wondering whether we have gone mad asking such a question? Do rocks ever fall from the sky? Of course they do! You might know them better as “meteorites”, and they are meteors, or rocks from outer space, that fall down to the earth. And what does that have to do with weather? It’s not like they come down like rain! And before you say to yourself “meteor shower”, remember that a meteor is actually a shooting star, a space-rock that burns up in the Earth’s atmosphere. Related, yes, but weather, no.

The weather connection is through another word, generally used to mean “study of the weather”. That word is “meteorology”. As you can see, all three have something in common – the word “meteor”.

So what is this word, and how did it come to mean these different things?

Meteor came into English through French in the late 15^th century. In French it was meteore. Very similar, you might think. Does this mean that it is a French word. Not at all. The next question we must ask ourselves is where did French get it from? The answer is from Medieval Latin meteorum, which meant “things in the heavens”. But this is not the end of the tale. Latin took the word from ancient Greek, and in Greek we can analyse the word to see what it really means.

The Greek word μετέωρα (meteora) can be broken into two parts: meta, which means “over, beyond” and aora, which comes from the verb αείρω/ αίρω (aeiro, airo), which meant “to raise, lift up”. Even today, in Modern Greek, αιωρείται (aioreitai) means “it hovers”. All this means that the original meaning of the word was “thing that is raised in the air”. And even in ancient times this developed to mean “things in the sky” and gradually came to have the meaning it does today.

Another interesting point is that the word “air” is in fact from the same root as αείρω (aeiro), which makes it a distant cousin, or cognate, of “meteor”.

Did you know:

One of the largest and most famous meteor craters is to be found in northern Arizona, desert of the U.S. It is 1,200m wide, 170m deep and calculated to be created 50,000 years ago! It is more commonly known as the Barringer Crater.

Title Photography: Mike Lewinski 2013

Amanda Scheliga 2007

Language & Literature

What’s in a name….?

Do you ever wonder why people can’t pronounce your name correctly? Or struggle to say a friend’s name right sometimes? Here Avani tells us about her experiences, and how we can make the effort to pronounce things as best we can!

Do people always get your name wrong?

My name is Avani and let me start by saying: I get it.

Sometimes I spend ages teaching someone how to say my name properly (Uvni would probably be the best way to write how it’s pronounced) and other times I really can’t be bothered. I wish I had an easier name, or that people would just work harder to get it right!

Why do we find some names really difficult to pronounce and others really easy?

Here in England, people have names which come from all over the world. These names might be from places where a different language is spoken, and the different languages may also use different letters or characters to those we use for English.

My family, for example, come from a part of India called Gujarat. The Gujarati language uses a syllabary (a set of sounds) rather than an alphabet, but the syllables don’t always match up with English letter. The ‘v’ in ‘Avani’ (વ in Gujarati script) should actually be pronounced somewhere in between the English ‘v’ and ‘w’ sounds, but there isn’t an English letter that sounds exactly the same and this makes my name harder for people to remember! Also the ‘a’ and ‘u’ sounds in Gujarati are written using variations of the same symbol (અ (u) and આ (a)), which is why my name is spelt with an ‘A’, but pronounced using a ‘U’. Here’s what ‘Avani’ looks like written in Gujarati: અવનો – cool, right?

Languages which do use the same letters as those in English, may not pronounce all of them in the same way. This means that names that look similar on paper may be pronounced differently depending on where in the world someone lives. In Spanish, for example, the ‘j’ and ‘x’ letters are more like (but not identical to!) the English ‘h’, and in German, the letter ‘j’ sounds more like the English ‘y’ – can you imagine all the different ways people around the world must pronounce ‘Jesus’? You can listen to a few here!

It’s not only names from other countries that are hard to pronounce though! Have you ever thought about which common English names might be tricky for someone learning the language to get their head around? What about the name ‘Thomas’? We say it with a hard ‘T’ (like the one in ‘tree’, rather than the one in ‘three’) even though it is spelt with a ‘Th’, and we say the name ‘Charlotte’ with a ‘Sh’ sound (like in shop) even though it is spelt with a ‘Ch’ (like in chop). It must be hard to keep up with which names follow the usual pronunciation rules (like Theo or Charles) and which ones don’t!

What can I do if I think I’m pronouncing someone’s name wrong?

It is always worth checking with someone if you think you’re saying their name wrong – even if you’ve known them for ages and are embarrassed about asking, chances are they’ll be really glad to have an opportunity to correct you! However, it’s also important to remember that even if you know that the way someone says their name is different to the traditional way of saying it, you should always say their name like they have asked you to. Many people living in England, for example, prefer to go by a nickname or a more ‘Anglicised’ (English-sounding) version of their name to make things a little easier – so if you know a ‘Jesminder’ who prefers ‘Jess’, or a ‘Paulo’ who prefers ‘Paul’, you should respect their decision!

If you’ve just met someone new and have forgotten how to pronounce their name (or even if you’ve met them a few

times) – don’t despair, they probably won’t mind if you ask them again! If you are too embarrassed, though, there is a huge variety of pronunciation websites out there which will be able to help you. Click here for a good one!

Do you have a hard-to-pronounce name? Or have you ever been in an embarrassing situation over getting someone’s name wrong? Do you live in another country – which English names do you really struggle with? I’d love to hear your stories!

As well as trying to get people to say her name right, Avani Shah is currently working on a book for 8-12 year olds. She also blogs about her childhood and teenage experiences (Away with the Mice) and writes about words, etymology, and spelling for a website called Spellzone.

Title Photograph: Daisy 2008

Nom & Malc 2008

RiPO 2012