CLASSES

Creative Movement: Creative Movement classes are offered to children ages 3 to 6. These classes focus on developing spatial and rhythmic awareness, balance and co-ordination as well as cooperation, listening skills and expression. Developmentally appropriate activities, pre-ballet exercises, stories, songs, and poems encourage the imagination and capitalize on the young child’s natural love of movement, while preparing them for more technical forms of training.

Ballet: Ballet is offered to students age 5 to adult. Ballet training develops correct posture and flexibility. It gives dancers basic placement and a dance vocabulary that applies to all dance forms. ACDA Ballet classes follow the Russian Style Ballet Syllabus.

Jazz: Jazz classes are offered to students age 7 to adult. Jazz is the energetic stage dance form that develops technique, flexibility, coordination and rhythm. In addition to traditional jazz, ACDA jazz classes may include both lyrical and funk styles, danced to anything from new age music to rock and roll.

Hip-Hop: Hip-Hop is offered to students age 12 and older. This athletic, urban dance form incorporates current dance trends to popular music.

Tap: Tap classes are offered to students age 6 to adult. Tap is an Ethnic American dance form made popular by musicals and currently a popular choice for recreational dancers of all ages.

Step Dance: Step Dance is offered to students age 6 to adult. Quick, neat and close to the floor, traditional Cape Breton Step Dance involves intricate percussive footwork danced to Scottish Strathspeys and Reels. Acadian and Irish reels may also be used.

Modern Dance: Modern is offered to students age 12 to adult. Modern Dance encompasses serious theatrical dance forms distinct from ballet and stage dance. Modern Dance is based on dynamism, formulated from natural rhythms, and may be experimental and creative in nature. ACDA Modern classes are based in Limon technique.

Dancercise: Dancercise is offered to adults. This class combines stretching and strengthening exercises and up-beat, moderately aerobic jazz dance routines.

Social Dance: Social Dance is offered to teens and adults. Social Dance classes include waltz, quickstep and foxtrot, jive (or swing) dance, and Latin dances such as salsa, mambo, and cha cha.

Musical Theatre: A class that draws on the natural links between body, voice and expression. Students learn dance routines and techniques (largely jazz and Broadway inspired), introductory singing technique, and basic acting and scene work skills. Classes focus on freeing the body and voice, building self-awareness, developing improvisational abilities, and on building team-working skills. Performance skills and self-expression are important elements of this class.

Parent & Child : This class is developed on the premise that movement and rhythm are natural, inherent ways of relating and learning. Through dance, parents and children discover and rediscover their bodies and the ways in which they relate to the world around us. Dancing – sometimes separate, sometimes with babe in arms, sometimes around one another – enhances both the connection between parent and child, and the child’s developing sense of self and independence. The classes draw on dance, yoga, music and massage to foster physical and mental awareness, musicality, self-confidence and a love of dance.