Excitement is building in the entertainment industry and our country is the focus! International casting teams are constantly in South Africa, recruiting potential child stars whose auditions encompass acting, singing and dancing. Sifting through thousands of ‘hopefuls’ to find the right combination of performer remains challenging!
Major American movie companies are building movie studios in our cities and one contract is underway as we speak. The opportunities available today for children / teens in the entertainment industry have never been so exciting – from auditions for movies to castings for commercials! And dancing is at the forefront of it all.
With this in mind, it is no longer viable to simply be a ‘master’ of your art. Today the industry demands that you be a “Jack of all trades”. Dancers have to be multi-skilled enough to be able to sing, act and dance. Dancers face challenges of mega proportions and must start to prepare themselves for the milestones and rewards that await them. Dancers need to be able to do numerous different things not only be physically fit and well trained – they need to be able to execute many different styles to get commercial work in the 21st century.
Teachers now need to be smart and to this end they need to look at a whole new kind of training. The kind that will keep the numbers in their studios constant and growing and not off seeking the latest trend offered down the road!
We at the TDA had a clear vision of where we believed dance training needed to go and this same clear vision encouraged us to start the “THEATRE DANCE ASSOCIATION” and then to write the THEATRE DANCE SYLLABI!
a syllabus with its own identity instead of being an echo of any other. The TDA syllabi is the only one of its kind, specifically devoted to many different dance disciplines and innovative teaching methods. It is all the more special for being an exclusively South African development and involves many of our leading teachers and choreographers in their specific field of expertise during its preparation. It has grown out of an enormous need for children of all dance disciplines to be trained in more versatile ways and apart from producing more versatile performers the focus is more on producing many more versatile THEATRE DANCE TEACHERS.
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