May 17th 2018
Acrobatic solo dance wins first place
Kit S in Year 6 has enjoyed fantastic dance results after a year of extremely hard work aiming towards the British Arts Awards (BAA). The BAA is an annual Dance, Singing and Drama competition involving multiple disciplines and performances in tough qualifying rounds, followed by area semi-finals. Due to his superb scores of over 85% in some of these rounds and achieving the highest band of Merit, he went through to win a place in the National Final in London last week for his acrobatic solo performance – for which he was awarded first place!
It was the culmination of a year’s hard work every Saturday and at extra practices. His teacher worked with him to choreograph his acrobatic dance routine with a genie from Aladdin theme, which he auditioned in May last year. It was tricky technically, involving moves including no handed cartwheels or aerial cartwheels, and forward and back hand springs. It began from a headstand position – wow!
Kit also reached the area semi-finals for his tap and modern dances and, while he also gained a Merit for these, his scores did not quite gain a place in the Finals. He also did extremely well to reach the semi-finals for his character dance. Kit is still waiting to hear the results of his singing group which performed ‘Do you Hear the People Sing?’ from Les Miserables in the Final.
It was Kit’s first ever entry into the British Arts Awards, or indeed any dance competition, and he only began dancing formally in October 2016. His dance school JG Dance and his teacher and parents are all very proud of him, as are we!
He also auditioned in April with 160 children to try to win a place in the English Youth Ballet and was offered a place to rehearse this summer and dance with professional dancers in three performances of a new production of Cinderella, to be performed in Nottingham Theatre Royal in July. Only three boys, including Kit, got through.
Huge congratulations to Kit on his hard-earned success and good luck for Cinderella!
