At Liberty Dance Center, we have said the phrase “Dance lessons teach life lessons” MANY times to our students and their families. In fact, it’s on our wall in big lettering for you to see right when you walk into the studio.
This is another one of our core values and something we try to teach and explain to our students as often as we can! This spring we talked about it quite often with our students as we quickly pivoted in a variety of ways (and continue to do so) due to the global pandemic.
I have always said that “99% of our dancers won’t dance after they graduate high school, if they even make it that far.” But at Liberty Dance Center we are passionate about the fact that dance is so important and that our students learn MORE than just pas de bourrees, pivot turns, and pirouettes.
In the dance studio, our students learn that hard work and dedication can take you far and sometimes further than natural talent. By staying strong and working through challenges and not giving up adds up to big results. Those results take time, but it’s so worth it. We simply love seeing our students succeed and love to celebrate their hard work and achievements!
They learn that working as a team is meaningful and special. Yes, as a dancer you are working on yourself the majority of the time. But when you are working with your team or class to produce a beautiful ballet dance or precise tap dance, teamwork makes the dream work! Ballet dancers’ body lines need to match and to sound clean and crisp tap dancers need to dance in sync. Dancers also feed off each other’s energy, which helps everyone involved!
Our dancers learn that helping others makes them feel good too! We often look for opportunities for our students to help each other out. That can be as simple as helping a classmate tie their shoe or lending them a hair tie. Or more official, by becoming an assistant teacher and helping out in a class or two every week. Every year we remind our older/more experienced dancers to help out the younger/newer dancers in their classes. We love finding chances for our dancers to connect and help mentor and help each other out.
This year, we have learned a few harder life lessons through dance. We learned that things don’t always turn out the way you planned or envisioned. Our traditional recital looked a lot different this year. There was no fancy stage, but did make the best of it and created unique memories that will last a lifetime!
We learned that dance really helps us not only physically but mentally and emotionally too. We received countless notes and messages from parents about how dance helped their kids get through this pandemic. Many dancers realized that following your passion is so important and so helpful through tough times. And lastly, we learned to never take anything for granted. We see now, that our dancers are truly appreciating dancing in the studio, seeing their friends and moving their bodies.
At Liberty Dance Center, we feel so lucky to be able to not only teach our dancers how to dance. We are lucky to be able to use dance as a vehicle to teach our students many valuable life lessons.
What life lessons does your dancer learn when they come to class?
