American Ballet Theatre National Training Curriculum - Why the change of syllabus?

At BDT we want to give our students the best possible dance experience, because we all know first hand the positive aspects dance can add to a person’s life. This led us on a search for a system of training that better served our students.

Previously, we religiously followed a syllabus, a ‘how to” set of exercises designed to achieve a certain outcome. Sometimes a syllabus meets the needs of the students, but if it doesn’t evolve over time it can start to feel restrictive and staid. As teachers who like to remain current and who work diligently to remain at the ‘cutting edge’ we were starting to feel as if the content we were teaching our BDT ballet students, wasn’t meeting the pace of current industry expectations or serving our students.

The system we are now planning to introduce is not a syllabus. It is a curriculum. This means it is a guideline, but we ourselves can create the content. Of course, it needs to meet certain criteria, but now we are able to design exercises that better meet the needs of our individual students. We have far greater flexibility to accommodate students different learning styles, abilities and physical capabilities. We can make changes if something isn’t working, we can be ADAPTABLE!

Our new curriculum was developed by top professionals across a variety of fields, not just dance masters but medical specialists and industry leaders, drawn from the best parts of historical ballet greats, based in well researched theory, child developmental stages, and safe dance practice. The curriculum is not only designed to train dancers who are adaptable to different genres, but who fully understand and inhabit the abiding principals of strong ballet technique.

We want our students to love Dance as much as we do! We know they might not all grown up to become Ballet dancers or dancers on Broadway and we are just as proud of them when they go off to university to become Drs and Lawyers because we know their dance journey has contributed greatly to their academic and social skills. Learning dance is as much about the journey as it is about the outcome, if not more. And besides, a love for the theatre and an intimate appreciation for the arts makes for better humans in general!

We believe this new curriculum will afford us and our dancers a greater control over our own environment and in turn greater opportunities to achieve success, individually and as a group. It also allows us, as teachers the ability to use our knowledge, experience AND creativity to create ballet levels and classes that gives us agency over our own work, to use and encourage critical thinking skills and most beneficially give our students the opportunity to really shine!