A Summer at Ballet Hartford

Written by TBBS Student, Hannah

This summer, I had the wonderful opportunity of participating in Ballet Hartford's summer intensive. There are several reasons I liked it.

One great thing about going somewhere else for an intensive is meeting new teachers. One of them kept giving me a correction that I had never thought about before: my arms in fifth were too high. Another teacher also helped me with my pointe shoes, helpfully showing me where to resew my elastics when my shoes kept falling off.

The peer group was also great. I made some friends, two girls who welcomed me, Ava and Penny. They were excellent dancers, along with many others of the students who I had the opportunity to watch and learn from. For example, once a teacher pointed out a dancer who had never particularly drawn my attention for her jumps. Once the teacher pointed it out, I saw that this girl really did have spectacular jumps and by watching her, I truly understood what ballon meant. I started trying to jump like her and found myself jumping higher.

My favorite part was when we learned choreography. Claire Kretzchmar's creative Ode for St. Cecilia piece was very fun and interesting. The music was a choral baroque piece which is not usually what people dance to. But in this case, the music only added to the allure of the choreography. It gave me a new challenge of dancing to something with counts that changed.

Ms. Claire also taught us the Liberty Bell’s solo. I don’t usually do much Balanchine, so it was interesting for me learning this very Balanchinesque solo. The variation has so many soldierly gestures and movements all so singular to Stars and stripes that just learning it taught me much about the ballet.

The contemporary teacher had a very different approach to choreography. She had her students make up their own choreographies in small groups which got to perform together. She gave each group a word to think about while they danced, like dart, float, or melt. But there was a twist, the teacher didn't let us pick our music until the day before the performance. Instead in rehearsals she picked random music and we had to figure out how to dance our choreographyies to it. I have never done anything like this before and thought it was very fun.

I am very glad I was able to do the Ballet Hartford intensive. It was good for me to do something different, and go someplace different. The excitement of it made me better able to focus and understand the teachers. It was a great experience.