This Ballet App for Dancers Encourages Interdisciplinary Learning
October 13, 2014

Let your students know they can use their smartphones for more than Snapchat!

Conversations on Dance isn’t just another fun app spreading dance to people who don’t know dance (as important as those are). This one is for serious, classical students. It can help young pre-professionals educate themselves on everything about ballet that isn’t covered in the studio.

Ballet Society, a nonprofit arm of the School of American Ballet originally founded by George Balanchine and Lincoln Kirstein in 1946, created the app. The goal? To educate complete, well-rounded dancers. Ballet Society director and School of American Ballet director emeritus Nancy Lassalle stated that today’s young dancers, “while technically adept, do not grasp the connections between dance, the humanities and the rest of the art world.” The app will aim to fill this gap by bringing dance history, theory and more to students’ fingertips.

Beginning with the topic of classicism, Conversations on Dance will offer a new theme every three months. Presented through pictures and text, the topics—including choreography, world cultures, photography and art—are designed to get young dancers thinking deeply about their art and, as the app’s title suggests, talking about it, too.

Conversations on Dance launches October 20 for iPhone and iPad, available through iTunes.

Photo by Amy Kelkenberg

Subscribe to our newsletters

Sign up for any or all of these newsletters

You have Successfully Subscribed!