Dance
The dance school at Brighton College offers dance as an aesthetic art form and provides a strong academic and flourishing extra curricular dance programme for pupils across all three schools from the age of three to eighteen.
Pupils take examined classes in Imperial Society Modern, Tap and Jazz dance, as well as studying Classical Ballet with The Royal Academy of Dance. Other pupils with a passion for dance study dance at GCSE through to A level or choose to take extra curricular dance classes as either an activity after school or as part of the Games Programme twice a week. Current activities include street dance, hip hop, breakdance, ballroom and latin american dance in addition to jazz dance and musical theatre.
Talented pupils have the opportunity to enter local competitive arts festivals and are also selected to perform in local and regional theatrical productions with the English Youth Ballet or Brighton and Hove Youth Dance Company. Academic dance pupils successfully audition for top dance conservatoires including Rambert Dance School, The Place and Laban. In 2007, three academic dance pupils also successfully achieved three of the top five marks in England for both GCSE and A level Dance.
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Such achievements reflect not only the commitment and dedication of the dance pupils but also the safe, happy and secure studio environment which Brighton College provides. Brighton College adopts the ethos that dance is for all. From the top dance scholar to the pupil that studies dance for theraputic means, dance can provide pupils with an avenue to explore their creative and spiritual inner selves, which in turn can provide them with the self-confidence, control, respect and moral values that can help to enrich their future lives.
Academic Dance Qualifications
As mentioned above, pupils with previous technical or creative experience in dance can opt to take GCSE, AS and A level dance where they study contemporary dance technique, choreography, dance appreciation, dance history and anatomy and physiology as well as labanotation which is a method for recording dance.
In addition to their curriculum studies, academic dance pupils have the opportunity to enrich their dance knowledge through participation in professional dance masterclasses and workshops with companies including 'Stan Won't Dance and 'Richard Alston Dance Company'. They also benefit from a rich array of theatre trips both locally and to London theatres to see companies including The Royal Ballet, Raphael Bonachela and DV8. Most importantly, academic dancers are encouraged to recognise and challenge their own potential, open their minds to the oppotunities that are avaliable to them in dance and push the boundaries of the syllabuses that they learn, to become innovative choreographers and performers in their own right.