One of my favourite things about dancing has actually got very little to do with the dancing… it’s the friends you make along the way.
Growing up is hard sometimes. Friendships at school can be tricky, best friends fall out, friendship groups change (sometimes approximately 14 times before lunchtime) and when you’re young, something happening at school can feel like your WHOLE world.
Which is why I think it’s so important for kids to have another little world outside of school too.
And for our kids, that’s often dance.
Dance friends might go to a completely different school, live in another town or be a few years older or younger. But they have one pretty big thing in common… they love the same thing you do.
There’s something really lovely about that – They’ve stood backstage together feeling sick with nerves, celebrated exam results, spent hours rehearsing the same dance, travelled to competitions, helped each other remember choreography and probably seen each other in some fairly questionable costumes over the years.
Some of my favourite BSOD moments are actually the bits that happen around the dancing.
The backstage giggles. The in jokes. The older dancers looking after the little ones. The celebrations when someone finally gets something they’ve been working on. The chaos on trips. The friendships between kids who probably would never have met if their parents hadn’t signed them up for dancing.
And those friendships can be really important when things elsewhere feel a bit rubbish.
If school has been hard that week, dance is another place to go. Another group of people. Another part of their life where they belong.
They don’t need to be best friends with everyone in the class (good grief, can you imagine), but they’re part of something together.
And as teachers, we get the really lovely job of watching those friendships grow up with them.
Little dancers become big dancers. Big dancers become helpers and Teaching Assistants. Some become lifelong friends. And years later, it’s often not the exact dance or exam mark they remember, it’s the people they did it all with.
Which brings us rather nicely to Bring a Bestie Week!
From Monday 21st September, lots of our dancers are bringing a friend along to class with them.
There will be friendship bracelets, lots of new faces and, I suspect, considerably more chatting than usual.
We can’t wait.
Because of course we want to teach brilliant dancers. But we also want BSOD to be somewhere our kids feel happy, safe, included and part of something.
Somewhere they find their people, and if they learn a decent plié while they’re at it, even better.
Miss L xx
