ONLINE PERFORMING ARTS/GYMNASTICS CLASSES? WHY BOTHER?!

These are uncertain times.  Every news cycle brings new statistics, guidelines, and fears.  Center Stage/Starz Gymnastics is starting up in-person classes in the fall because we feel confident that we can do it while keeping our students, faculty and staff healthy and safe.    

But those are decisions each person/family/parent needs to make for him/herself.  Perhaps you have family members who are in high-risk groups, and you don’t want to take the chance of bringing the virus into your home.  Is it even worth the time and trouble registering for classes if you aren’t going to be in the studio? 

When quarantine first hit in March, we wondered that ourselves.  How can you teach dance/acting/gymnastics online?  It probably isn’t something we would have started from scratch, but we had all of these classes that were in the middle of a term.  So we dove into it, and found that there are all sorts of things that we can teach online.  It’s certainly different.  Nobody’s going to learn to do flips on the trampoline through Zoom.  But there are a lot of things that we actually found more effective teaching online. 

There are far fewer distractions for our students when they are in their living room looking at a computer screen.  We also found that some students felt less inhibited working hard on their specific skills when they didn’t have to do it in front of the whole class.  Many of our students actually progressed more in their training online than they would have during the same time in the studio. 

It also brought all of us back to square one with our teaching goals.  Each one of us grew up doing what we now teach.  When we first started to teach, we had to ask ourselves how we go about teaching this thing that we love so much.  What are the skills and techniques that are required to bring our students to the level of excellence that we currently have?  Moving to online teaching forced us to re-examine those techniques and how we were communicating them.  I think it made each one of us a better teacher and communicator.  

So what gets taught in online classes in each discipline? 

DANCE! 

Center Stage Artistic Director, George Warren, taught Jr. Company classes, and advanced tap classes through Zoom.  Though it was hard, he ultimately realized that he could teach quite effectively.  “I found that I could focus more specifically on each student’s issues and problems,” George said.  “I feel like I fixed some mistakes that I may never have gotten to in the studio.”  

Acting 

The acting and musical theatre classes were right in the middle of rehearsals for showcase performances.  Acting Department head Stephen Waldrup said, “All of the peripheral parts of putting together a scene – blocking, behavior, props – got put aside, and we focused exclusively on each character reaching out and communicating with the others.  I know my students are better actors for the time we spent on Zoom.” 

Gymnastics 

This was the hardest, and it took us the longest to figure out how to do it, but we ultimately found it very rewarding.  Gymnastics coach Sue Garahan said, “Floor exercise is the basis for work on all of the apparatus.  Working at home, we were able to work on strength and flexibility, so that when we come back to the gym, they’ll be able to do more things on the apparatus because of the time they’ve put in focused on technique and body positions.”  

From a personal perspective, at the beginning of quarantine, virtual classes rescued my relationship with my teenage daughter.  With school online and dance cancelled, I was trapped in the house with a teenage Zombie.  She slept late, did some schoolwork, and walked around in a lifeless funk.  Then, when we started Zoom classes, the Zombie would wake up around noon, mope around the house until time for dance class, and then suddenly arise from the dead.  After spending a couple hours doing what she loved and connecting with friends and teachers, she was full of life, happy, chatty, making plans for all of the things she wanted to get done in quarantine time.  Granted, it wasn’t a lasting recovery, but knowing that the happy girl I was raising was still in there made it so much easier to get through the dark moods.  I don’t know how kids without some similar outlet made it through those difficult times. 

Please feel free to leave a comment below if you’d like to tell us your experiences or concerns with online learning.  If you have any questions, give us a call at the studio  732 238-7890.