Grand River Academy Of Dance

Inaugural Post

I wanted to add a blog to GRAD’s website…

I decided to name it “Straight to the Pointe”.  There will be a few different bloggers on here including myself…so here is someback ground on me!

I started ballet when I was three….when I became a Dance teacher, I was still taking classes with the teacher I had when I was three…I modeled my classes after hers.  The way I explained things, the little sayings she had and the passion she had for dance I have carried with me in all I have done in dance. The deep respect I have for the art and the studio environment I learned from her.

Her dance studio was a place where I learned at a young age to overcome my shyness, where I spent time with my best friends, where I learned things about myself I didn’t know.

When I was eight I started taking Jazz.  That teacher was very different from my ballet teacher.  From her I learned not only a different form of dance from what I had been taught for the first five years of my dance career, but I learned how to laugh at myself and how to push myself to do things I never thought I could do.  I found in her and my ballet teacher, mentors and more importantly life long friends who mean a great deal to me.

After 20 years of learning from these women (and for the record, I continue to learn from them both) I took all the things I learned from them and started to impart that knowledge on my own students…

Being a dance teacher is more than showing a child how to spin, jump or string together a series of steps…it’s about all of that but also molding them into respectful, beautiful people who are graceful, strong and who appreciate movement, music and teamwork.

I want this blog to be not only about my experiences as a teacher and a dancer, but that of all the staff at GRAD.  This blog will have snippets form the minds of the staff, but also cool dance related things we come across on our travels through the dance world.

Maybe then our passion and love of dance will become infectious…not only in the classroom but here too.

Till the next post!!

Miss Laura