BUSINESS TRACK

Guerrilla Marketing for Dance Teachers

In this seminar, marketing expert Mike Collins offers 50-plus inexpensive, easy-to-use ways for you to gain and retain great new students. You will also learn how to quickly create a low-cost marketing plan and a marketing calendar as well as which marketing strategies increase enrollment. 

Expert Time Management

Would you like to understand where your time goes, how to get more done in the time you have and still have time for yourself? In this program, Mike Collins will show you how to have a better handle on the tasks, people and events in life that affect your time. 

Studio Owners’ Forum

Not sure how much to pay your teachers? Need advice on dealing with customers who are delinquent on payment? Take the opportunity to connect with peers from all over the country in a discussion designed to give you new ideas and effective approaches for tackling your most critical business challenges.    

SESSIONS

AFRICAN

Intro to West African Dance

Andrea Markus teaches a high-energy dance class focusing on the movements and rhythms of Guinea, West Africa. Participants will learn about the traditional purpose of each dance, as well as the tribes that originated them. Connecting mind, body and spirit, students also learn to relate to the music and those around them. This class will be accompanied by live drumming. 

BALLET

Ballet Master Class with David Howard

This master class with David Howard will explore techniques designed to expand the classical ballet vocabulary, while increasing the movement potential and kinetic awareness of your students. 

Formulas for Turns and Jumps

Finis Jhung shares his time-tested formulas for turns, which will enable your students to have beautifully controlled pirouettes from fourth and fifth position, fouetté turns and turns in second. In addition, learn the secrets that will have your students making jetés and assemblés that “stand in the air.”  

Dance Across the Floor!

Breathe new life into familiar movements with Finis Jhung’s challenging and innovative combinations for adagio, allegro, petit allegro and grand allegro, choreographed to the orchestrated music of Scott Killian.  

Ballet Center Work

Discover how to make your ballet class more challenging, interesting and beneficial to your students. Eleanor D’Antuono details the structure and musicality of each center exercise, examining each movement in detail, with emphasis placed on its precise execution and particular use.  

Ballet Barre Work

Finis Jhung will lead you through a power barre designed to strengthen your feet, ankles, knees, hips and core. Learn how developing proper placement, balance and foot-ankle-knee strength at the barre aids in the correct execution of center exercises, turns and jumps.  

Pointe Work

Pick up introductory to advanced exercises for dancers working en pointe, including teaching tips, proper alignment techniques and injury prevention from Eleanor D’Antuono.

BROADWAY WORKSHOP

Broadway Workshop: In the Heights

Cast member Luis Salgado will teach choreography from the new Broadway hit In the Heights, winner of the 2008 Tony Award for Best Musical and Best Choreography. 
 

CONDITIONING/ANATOMICAL AWARENESS

Pilates for Dancers

Learn how to incorporate Pilates techniques and principles into your dance class and performance with Julian Littleford.  

Active Isolated Flexibility

Developed by Michèle Assaf with sports therapist Jim Wharton and exercise physiologist Phil Wharton, Active Isolated Flexibility is a series of stretches that improve performance, increase flexibility and prevent injury by activating muscle fibers, transporting oxygen to sore muscles and removing toxins. Assaf will teach you how to enable your limbs to move freer and your muscles to recover faster. 

Nia for Dancers: Challenging the Brain-Body Connection

Caroline Kohles and Kevin VerEecke show you how to incorporate Nia principles and exercises into your classes to help improve your dancers’ body awareness, inspiration and joy of movement.

Conditioning for Jumps 

Come explore simple flexibility and strengthening exercises to maximize your jumping potential with Deborah Vogel. 

Yoga for Dancers

Calm the mind, warm, strengthen and stretch the body with Cathy Roe, as she leads a “Flow Yoga” class.

Stay in Shape! Top Tips for Teachers

Where are the key areas that teachers should focus on when it comes to their own health? Deborah Vogel shares simple and effective exercises for physical health as well as key body/mind concepts to keep your teaching on the leading edge.

Nia: Mind/Body Warmup

A Nia warmup invites you to expand your awareness of physical sensations, creating a safer, more personal environment in which to move. Nia black-belt Caroline Kohles will lead you through multiple Nia exercises designed to enhance your understanding of this essential portion of class.

CHILDREN’S DANCE

Growing a Dancer Workshop (Ages 5+)

Join Ellen Robbins and explore how to weave developmentally appropriate technique, improvisation and composition as a modern dance experience for children, ages 5 through high school.   

Ballet for Children (Ages 6–8)

Observe Mignon Furman and her young students as they work through the exercises of her First Steps program, a system of simplified ballet technique that makes it easier and more fun to learn, while developing the technique and vocabulary appropriate for their age.  

Inspiring Creativity in Children (Ages 8+)

Through in-school partnerships, workshops and public performances, National Dance Institute uses dance as a catalyst to engage children and motivate them towards excellence. Led by NDI instructors, this workshop will include participation in NDI dance class exercises followed by a discussion of the fundamentals of the NDI method. 

InterPlay Improvisation Technique

Discover new ways to free your students’ movement, decrease self-judgment and respond to the unexpected through InterPlay’s improvisation techniques. Diane Smagatz-Rawlinson will guide you through incremental improvisational activities based on the concepts of acceptance, affirmation and group cohesion.  

JAZZ

Assaf Warmup

Michèle Assaf shares her signature jazz warmup, used worldwide by dozens of students and teachers. 

LehrerDance Technique & Repertory

John Lehrer leads you through exercises in the LehrerDance style, focusing on its four main elements: circularity, three-dimensionality, momentum and organic athleticism, and teaches you combinations from the company’s repertory. Experience a class that engages your entire physicality, combining elements of ballet, modern and jazz to achieve a more efficient and engrossing way of movement and expression.  

Lyrical

Sheila Barker shares original lyrical choreography and tips on how to build your students’ technique while fostering individual style and artistry. 

Teaching Jazz Leaps and Turns

Bob Rizzo hones in on the essential technical elements for precise turns and soaring leaps. 

Vintage Jazz: Everything Old Is New Again

Join Thom Cobb at the Savoy Ballroom in the 1930s and experience the early jazz, vernacular steps and syncopated styles that were popular long before rock and roll, funk and hip hop ever existed. Lindy Hop, Big Apple, Black Bottom, Truckin’ and the like can be incorporated into your own compositions, are body friendly and easily adaptable for any age. Let’s boogie! 

LehrerDance Warmup

Jon Lehrer combines elements of modern, jazz and ballet to give his dancers an efficient, total body warmup. By creating energy from the inside out, you’ll learn how to loosen the joints and activate turnout while focusing on proper alignment and strengthening the center and back.

Broadway Jazz

Bob Rizzo leads you through the steps that shaped today’s Broadway. 

Jazz Progressions

Sheila Barker shares her signature style in progressions and choreography for jazz class. Find ways to help your dancers release tension and feel more comfortable learning jazz technique and improve their focus, range of motion and freedom of movement. 

Jazz & Lyrical Choreography

Choreographer Cathy Roe teaches you new original jazz and lyrical routines to take home to your students.  

HIP HOP

Hip Hop: All for You

Rediscover why you dance as Gregg Russell fuses old-school history with new contemporary moves.  

Hip Hop Fundamentals

Pat-y-o’s unique combination of East and West Coast hip-hop styles brings sharp and crisp movements together with grace. In this class, you’ll work through a series of warm-up and across-the-floor exercises specifically designed for hip-hop technique, then learn original choreography to bring home to your students.  

Hip Hop

Experience the fresh energy of Luam’s unique, eclectic style, as she infuses hip hop with elements of West/East African dance and jazz. 

LATIN

Latin

Tony Meredith and Melanie LaPatin teach you the basics of the hottest Latin dances, including the Salsa, Mambo, Merengue and Cha-Cha, and how to incorporate them into your classroom and choreography. 

MODERN

Modern Technique & Repertory

Bill Evans will lead a workshop in the modern dance technique he has developed since 1976. Evans’ technique develops the skills and expressive qualities required to successfully perform his choreography, but also give dancers tools to approach other modern styles more successfully. Integrating anatomical and kinesiological principles with a focus on injury prevention, it utilizes the language, concepts and overarching themes of Laban Movement Analysis. The class will be based on developmental movement patterns and will conclude with the opportunity to learn and perform an extended phrase excerpted from one of Evans’ major choreographic works.  

Modern Master Class

Experience Seán Curran’s multidisciplinary approach to contemporary dance training and technique. Beginning with a thorough warmup that incorporates ideas of release and principles of yoga, this class will progress using exercises derived from Merce Cunningham and José Limón techniques. 

Improvisation

Discover new ways of moving and expand the possibilities for composition and performance in this guided improvisation class with Seán Curran. 
 

TAP

Speed Racer: Tap Combinations for Speed & Clarity

Gregg Russell shares tap techniques and combinations to help build and sustain speed and clarity. 

Tap Master Class

Tap star Dormeshia Sumbry-Edwards shares useful techniques in establishing clarity, speed, phrasing and musicality. 

Tap Technique

Germaine Salsberg gives you tips and combinations to improve technique.  

Classic Tap Combos

Germaine Salsberg shares combinations from historical figures in tap, including the signature steps of Danny Daniels and Buster Brown, Bill Robinson’s time steps and Leonard Reed’s Shim Sham.  
 

THEATER DANCE

Theater Dance

Born and raised in the world of dance and dance education, Joshua Bergasse’s contemporary theater dance is rooted in the classic styles of jazz, while emphasizing the importance of the personal style and artistry of the student. 

SEMINARS AND PANEL DISCUSSIONS

Ask the Expert

You’ve read her column in Dance Magazine. Now join former New York City Ballet dancer and author Linda Hamilton, PhD, in a conversation on the stresses of teaching, avoiding burnout and how to better address your students’ emotional, mental and physical needs.

K–12 Forum 

K–12 educators share advice on addressing common classroom issues and maintaining an organized, yet flexible, learning environment.

Higher Ed

Are you giving your students the tools to succeed in the college setting? Join fellow studio, higher-ed and K-12 educators as they discuss proper training methods, school selection and the audition and application process.  

Choosing Music

Get fun and age-appropriate ideas that will expand your classroom and performance playlists. Learn how to find and edit music and use the latest software technology.