Team Hud Adult Ballet Class

Our local university is The Times Higher Education University of the Year. The university's website notes:

"The award comes at an exciting time at the University with its new Student Central building due to open in early January. The new building will form a central hub, home to the Students’ Union and support services plus a state-of-the-art sports centre and gym which includes an eight court sports hall, two squash courts and two dance studios as well as a gym kitted out with Technogym Artis technology."

I tried out one of the dance studios at 18:30 this evening when I attended the first adult ballet class given by Fiona Noonan. I have mentioned Fiona before because she also teaches at The Base Studios in Huddersfield.

Today's class consisted of about 20, all women, most of whom were quite young. Although the class is open to the public I guess that at least half the pupils were undergraduates. For many of us it was our first lesson.  

We started with pliés, then tendus followed by glissés, ronds de jambe, fondus and développés at the barre and then some centre work which included chassés and posés pirouettes. Finally, we finished with stretches. 

This class was just what I needed. My confidence had taken a knock a week or two ago when I fell flat on my face trying to do posés pirouettes that I had not really mastered and I was starting to ask myself whether at age 65 I wasn't getting a little bit too old for this ballet malarkey. One day my body will say "no" and I think that is likely to come sooner rather than later but until it does I am going to pack in as many classes as I can. The London Ballet Circle shared a poster on its Facebook page from Étude Ballet Boutique with the words "Money can't buy you happiness but it can buy you ballet classes which are kind of the same thing," Oh how true.

The class meets every Wednesday during term between 18:30 and 19:30 in the Student Central Building which is opposite Sainsburys. There is plenty of street parking at that time. For those using public transport the university is perhaps 5 minutes walk from the bus station and slightly further from the railway station. Classes cost £5 per hour.

Post Script

Fiona sent me the following text last night after reading the review:

"u forgot to mention how fabulous I am ....... hee hee xxx,"

Actually that is quite an omission because a good teacher is everything when learning ballet and in my very limited experience Fiona is one of the best.

Well, I say limited, but when I think of it I have had regular ballet classes from three teachers, occasional classes from another two and of course lots of teaching in other subjects from classical Greek to COBOL programming.  The test of a good teacher is whether he or she can stretch his or her pupils to their limits of and Fiona certainly did that.  We did a lot of exercises which do not come easily and we all made a reasonable stab at them. Best of all we left the class chattering and happy.