Teaching Beginning Ballet Technique - Gayle Kassing and Danielle Jay

Teaching Beginning Ballet Technique

by Gayle Kassing and Danielle Jay

NEW, 200 pages

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About Teaching Beginning Ballet Technique

Teaching a beginning ballet class can be a challenge. Even dancers who have studied ballet for many years may be intimidated by the idea of teaching ballet technique. Teaching Beginning Ballet Technique puts new teachers at ease by explaining exactly what to teach and when and how to teach it.

The authors couple ballet pedagogy with motor learning, teaching styles assessment, and instructional strategies to offer valuable insight and advice for teaching beginning ballet. With its inviting layout and easy-to-read format, Teaching Beginning Ballet Technique facilitates the learning process for both the instructor and the student. 

Part I gives instructors the tools they'll need to teach the content in Part II. It provides specific information about the teaching/learning process, understanding the theoretical foundations of ballet, constructing and managing the class, and assessing student progress. 

Part II presents a logical, sequential plan that guides instructors through the actual teaching of exercises, steps, principles, and progressions. The authors outline four instructional units, each representing three to four weeks of a high school or college term. Each unit includes objectives, teaching strategies, assessment tools, teacher responsibilities, and performance test content. In addition, each exercise and step is accompanied by a detailed description consisting of 

• a definition with pronunciation cues, 
• a verbal depiction,
• arm positions, 
• standard introductory movements or preparation,
• proper breathing or breath phrasing, 
• teaching cues and images,
• an assessment checklist, and
• much more.

The book also contains 215 photos that illustrate proper beginning ballet technique.

About Gayle Kassing

Gayle Kassing teaches dance at Jacksonville University in Jacksonville, FL. She has taught ballet technique for more than 25 years in various settings, including higher education, a university-based community dance program, and professional and civic dance schools. She has also owned and operated her own dance studios.

No stranger to publishing, Kassing has been writing ballet education articles that focus on teaching and assessment for more than 15 years. She also served as the publications director for the National Dance Association.

A member of the National Dance Association and the Florida Dance Association, Kassing earned her PhD in dance and related arts from Texas Woman's University.

About Danielle Jay

Danielle M. Jay is an associate professor of dance education at Northern Illinois University. She has studied ballet since the age of three and has taught ballet at the college level for more than 25 years.

Jay has studied with Margaret Craske and Celene Keller at Jacob's Pillow and with David McLain, David Blackburn, and Oleg Sabline at the University of Cincinnati. She holds a PhD in dance and related arts from Texas Woman's University.

Jay is a member of the National Dance Association, which is a part of the American Alliance of Health, Physical Education, Recreation and Dance.

About Dance

Dance is an art form that generally refers to movement of the body, usually rhythmic and to music, used as a form of expression, social interaction or presented in a spiritual or performance setting.

Dance may also be regarded as a form of nonverbal communication between humans, and is also performed by other animals (bee dance, patterns of behaviour such as a mating dance). Gymnastics, figure skating and synchronized swimming are sports that incorporate dance, while martial arts kata are often compared to dances. Motion in ordinarily inanimate objects may also be described as dances (the leaves danced in the wind).

Definitions of what constitutes dance are dependent on social, cultural, aesthetic, artistic and moral constraints and range from functional movement (such as folk dance) to virtuoso techniques such as ballet. Dance can be participatory, social or performed for an audience. It can also be ceremonial, competitive or erotic. Dance movements may be without significance in themselves, such as in ballet or European folk dance, or have a gestural vocabulary/symbolic system as in many Asian dances. Dance can embody or express ideas, emotions or tell a story.

Dancing has evolved many styles. Breakdancing and Krumping are related to the hip hop culture. African dance is interpretative. Ballet, Ballroom, Waltz, and Tango are classical styles of dance while Square and the Electric Slide are forms of step dances.

Every dance, no matter what style, has something in common. It not only involves flexibility and body movement, but also physics. If the proper physics is not taken into consideration, injuries may occur.

Choreography is the art of creating dances. The person who creates (i.e., choreographs) a dance is known as the choreographer.

Dance does not leave behind clearly identifiable physical artifacts such as stone tools, hunting implements or cave paintings. It is not possible to say when dance became part of human culture. Dance has certainly been an important part of ceremony, rituals, celebrations and entertainment since before the birth of the earliest human civilizations. Archeology delivers traces of dance from prehistoric times such as the 9,000 year old Rock Shelters of Bhimbetka paintings in India and Egyptian tomb paintings depicting dancing figures from c. 3300 BC.

One of the earliest structured uses of dances may have been in the performance and in the telling of myths. It was also sometimes used to show feelings for one of the opposite gender. It is also linked to the origin of "love making." Before the production of written languages, dance was one of the methods of passing these stories down from generation to generation.

Another early use of dance may have been as a precursor to ecstatic trance states in healing rituals. Dance is still used for this purpose by many cultures from the Brazilian rainforest to the Kalahari Desert.

Sri Lankan dances goes back to the mythological times of aboriginal yingyang twins and "yakkas" (devils). According to a Sinhalese legend, Kandyan dances originate, 250 years ago, from a magic ritual that broke the spell on a bewitched king. Many contemporary dance forms can be traced back to historical, traditional, ceremonial, and ethnic dance.

Teaching Beginning Ballet Technique