My experience at this studio was very negative.
I had been looking forward to taking my first ballet class in over a year, having cleared some time in my schedule to take it up again. The class was quite full (about 20) and the teacher's voice was very quiet. Plus, she didn't do any demonstration of the sequences. However, I made it through the barre work, centre adagio and pirouette exercises but began to struggle with the jumps. I'm a visual-kinesthetic learner, and without any demonstration and a significant time between classes, my body was struggling to remember the vocabulary.
The teacher approached me in the middle of the combination to say that the class was too hard for me and that I should join a different class if I was considering coming back at all. I felt the timing of her feedback entirely insensitive as for the reminder of the class I felt too embarassed to keep dancing. This is meant to be an adult ballet class, and we were a class of women ranging from mid twenties to forties, but I felt demeaned as if I was little more than a child.
After the class I spoke to her and told her that i felt it was inappropriate for her to give an opinion of my dance level in the middle of the class and suggested that next time she approach this kind of feedback afterwards. Well, she became very agitated, began pointing her finger accusingly and demanded "how dare a student talk to a teacher like that?"
Enough said, really.
All in all, my experience here reminded me of the worst qualities of ballet teaching when it is mishandled: sadistic and superior. read more