Mainstream Theatre Arts : Dance

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Mainstream's school dance classes are designed to:

Kids

provide pupils with general skills in dance
teach a variety of dance styles from around the world
promote physical awareness and physical fitness
promote teamwork and collaboration

Dance: the fastest-growing art form

dancers Dance is one of the fastest-growing performing arts in the country, with nearly five million participants each year in the UK. It is second only to football as the most popular activity in schools and has the fastest-growing number of after-school clubs. A 2005 survey in the north west of England showed that nearly a third of year nine pupils take part in dance every week and more than a third would like to do more dance during school time.

Recent TV programmes featuring dance styles ranging from ballroom to pop and even ice dance have had huge viewing figures and have increased the demand for dance lessons from people of both sexes at all ages.

Dance as a physical discipline

“Dance is the fastest growing art form, with over 13 percent of the population now attending dance performances and over 4.8 million people participating in community dance each year in England. Ten million people regularly watched the BBC’s Strictly Come Dancing, and a recent survey of over 50,000 14 year olds showed dance was the second most popular physical activity after football.We want to celebrate and invigorate dance in this country.”

Alistair Spalding
Chair of Dance UK
Chief Executive and Artistic Director, Sadler's Wells

Dance is the ultimate form of physical expression using movement; it is a very strict discipline that can depict a freedom of emotion and movement that is not found in any other artform.

Dancers have to be as physically fit as any athlete, remember and reproduce complex sequences of actions and communicate characters, emotions and even whole stories to audiences purely through movement.

Dance as exercise

Dance is also a very effective—and enjoyable—method of exercise that has benefits for the heart, lungs, muscles and bones as well as improving coordination, agility, balance, spatial awareness and flexibility and helping to prevent excessive weight gain.

It also has many of the social benefits of our drama classes, such as increasing confidence and the ability to work with others towards a common goal.

Mainstream's teachers have a wide repertoire of styles of dance, including classical ballet, tap, musical theatre, pop and street dance and traditional forms of dance from other cultures. We teach general skills in movement, dance and physical expression, analyse music through movement and create whole dance routines that have to be memorised and repeated as part of a whole group.