My Work Experience at The Place

My week's work experience at The Place has been hugely insightful into the dance industry as a whole. Coming into this week I knew The Place was a huge hub for dance but I hadn’t quite realised how vastly they contribute to the dance world. Recreational dance classes for all ages, CAT schemes, the theatre, and LCDS are all huge parts of what The Place does but they do much more on top of those.

I learned how The Place is able to support dance artists, young dancers, and children on their dance journeys. I was able to see this working with the Development team where I learnt about how The Place operates as a charity and the Creative Learning team where I got to learn about the different outreach that The Place does, such as going to local primary schools to provide dance classes, and the behind the scenes of their youth platform performances which was very interesting for me to hear about as I had taken part in one just a few weeks ago.

I was able to spend a morning with the CAT team learning valuable information for me as I would like to teach dance at some point in my career. I was then able to observe the CAT classes that evening which I really enjoyed as I was able to see how different teachers work with and respond to different age groups.

With the Classes & Courses team I was able to observe an over 60s dance class this was very interesting for me to see as I am not very familiar with how recreational classes for adults are run and taught. I found it very insightful and learnt things that I will try to carry with me for teaching dance in the future. I loved watching this class because it seemed like a very supportive group sharing their love for movement, music, and dance.

One of my favourite parts of the week was watching a sharing of a new work still in rehearsals. It is being created for The Place's Playground tour, which is an initiative created to take exciting dance works to schools. This sharing was in a studio with a small audience of children watching the piece. I loved seeing both the reactions of the children and the actual dance. The children found so much joy in simple moments and it was so lovely to see such young children finding joy in dance, some of them were even getting up to try and join in. I also loved watching the dance because dance created for children is not something I would usually see, so it was interesting, especially as someone interested in choreography in the future, to see how dance can be made more accessible for children. The piece had, of course, been created with children in mind but the actual movement content was fascinating, even more so after hearing the inspiration behind the piece from the choreographer.

Alongside all this I was also able to see the LCDS side of The Place this was very interesting as I want to apply to LCDS in the near future. This involved observing classes, helping in the costume department and the library. This gave me a huge insight into the teaching and inner working of LCDS which you wouldn’t see in such detail at an open day. Something I loved about observing classes was the live music, it was fascinating to watch the different ways the teachers and musicians interacted. The music is always so unique and interesting. I find The Place’s commitment to live music so important because music is such a huge part of dance and when different art forms are able to collaborate is when really exciting ideas are created.

Overall my week at The Place gave me a great insight into the work that goes on at The Place but also of the wider dance world. I found the week so inspiring and am so pleased I had this opportunity.

By Grace Balcombe