The Casual Dance Teacher's Podcast

Welcome to the Casual Dance Teacher's Podcast. I'm your host, Maia. No matter who, what, or when you teach, I'm here to share all my best tips and tools, along with real and practical conversations with fellow dance educators to help you be the very best dance teacher you can be.

Let's talk about it. Hi, everyone. Thanks so much for being here.

We are embarking on something new today. This will be a series, quote unquote, but I'm going to be breaking this up over the coming weeks or possibly even months, so we'll have some other content in between. But I am producing a series of episodes, today being the first one, about various different styles of ballet technique or ballet training, just to try to give new dance teachers or dance teachers that are looking to maybe get a more formal syllabus, more formal training for themselves that they can pass on to their students to give them an idea of what's out there, what's available, the pros and cons of each, sort of comparing and contrasting.

And I'm really excited to delve into these conversations. I do also at the same time want to preface this by saying that I am just having a conversation with one person that is trained in these various styles. So this is by no means an exhaustive overview of that style, nor is it representative of my personal opinions on any particular style.

It's just one person's experience, their views of it, their answers to the questions. And I think in hearing that, this will open up greater conversations between us within the Casual Dance Teachers Network on Facebook or on the Casual Dance Teachers Podcast Instagram page. It might open up some ideas for you as a teacher of what might be the best path for you.

And that's what I'm looking to do with this series is just kind of open things up, start a dialogue, get a little bit more information out there. So today's guest is going to be talking to us all about Vaganova technique and her experience with the Vaganova style. And she is absolutely an expert in this field.

I am very pleased to tell you a little bit more about Pamela Lauer. Pamela Lauer received her Vaganova training at the School of the Hartford Ballet in Hartford, Connecticut, the Hrabowski School of New York, and the Maryland Ballet. She has also studied at numerous studios, seminars, and workshops throughout the U.S. and Europe and performed with the repertory company of the School of the Hartford Ballet, the Baltimore Ballet Society, Maryland Ballet, and many others.

Pamela has been on the faculty of Hartford Community College since 1981 and has held dance instruction positions at additional local colleges. Her students have gone on to further their dance educations at various universities and perform with companies throughout the United States, Europe, and Asia. So let's get right into it.

I am so pleased to welcome Pamela Lauer. Pamela, thank you again so much for being here and joining us and talking all things Vaganova today. I'm really, really excited to get into it.

I guess I'll start with kind of a caveat on my end so you know where I'm coming from, because I am going to ask you a lot of really sort of basic questions. I think I just kind of want this to be an open conversation about what different styles of ballet training can look like and the nuts and bolts of them and not necessarily to try and compare them as in one being better than the other, but just to give some more information to dance teachers who might be discerning like if certain paths will work better for them and or for their students, etc. So today we're talking about Vaganova and I want to start by kind of learning about what led you into studying that approach specifically and a little bit more about your background.

Pamela
Okay, so I was from Baltimore City originally, and this would be in the 50s. So in the 50s in Baltimore City, we're not talking a big ballet hub. Yeah, the Maryland Ballet, the Harbor City Ballet, the Ballet of Maryland, every ballet we've ever had or tried to have out of Baltimore, it's just always dwarfed by the fact that we're in between Washington and New York.

We can't compare with DC or New York, so our ballet company was always struggling. So anyway, so that's kind of like the Baltimore City world, but I was literally in every ballet school that we could find in Baltimore City for my whole life and I just realized when I go from school to school looking for something better that no one was consistent in training. There was no consistency.

A lot of that were Rockettes that had come back to their hometown and started their own little dance studio or someone that was originally a burlesque dancer. Do you know what I mean? Like that old, old school, the dance teachers that are all now no longer performing professionally, they started dance studios and they all had various experiences, but I wasn't finding anyone that was specifically writing every single thing that happened in the ballet world down. So I just struggled with that for years.

I mean, I was with Maryland Ballet and yes, I danced and everybody said, oh, that's wonderful. But when I thought that I was going to go teach and then I tried to teach, then I realized what my problem was, is I was teaching the way I had been taught without a constructive foundation and a true syllabus. So the only program that I could find, and this was now in the 70s, was with the Hartford Ballet in Connecticut.

Enid Lynn and Michael Uthoff, they developed, actually the Hartford Ballet at that time was pretty much on the same level as New York City Ballet. They were right up there. They designed a program for teaching the Vaganova system in a two-year program.

So again, you had to go audition, you had to sign your life away that you were going to be there for the two years so that they invested in you. It's part of the Hart School of Music and the University of Hartford now. I was there at the very beginning when they were just trying to get that happening.

So we basically had dance classes, pedagogy classes, kinesiology classes, all the stuff that you hear now in colleges, but it didn't exist in the 70s. The only thing, Bennington had some dance programs, but they were mostly modern. I finally found a school that was going to just concentrate on ballet, and essentially we rewrote the Vaganova syllabus every day.

That's how we learned it. We had theory class, day one, grade A, this is how it's done. We hand-wrote every single day all the levels of everything.

It took over two years. That's unbelievable. We kept saying, why can't we just have a book that already has this all printed? Eventually, I did acquire a book that was printed in the 70s.

Everybody calls it my Bible. It literally is from class one, day one, through the eight-year syllabus. It's a wonderful book.

But anyway, the reason they had us write it, and it's just like anything else, when you hand-write something, and then you physically get up and do it at the same time that you're writing, it's going to stick.

Maia
Yeah. Now, on the other flip side of that, I have to ask, that process obviously cannot be the same now as when you were going through it.

Do you know what the certification process and options are out there for someone that is wanting to get into it now?

Pamela
I kept checking on things like that. The Bolshoi has online programs, and it's $1,000 for the seminar. It said it's $700, but if you want the test and the certificate, it's $1,000.

Maia
Gotcha. Okay.

Pamela
That was for the pre-ballet section and for the ballet section.

Again, nowhere does it say that anybody has really ... Who are these Bolshoi people that are putting this online? Okay. Do you know what I mean?

Maia
Yeah.

Pamela
I've looked up and tried to find how it's certified, and they just said, it's $1,000, and we'll certify you in Vaganova.

Maia
Okay. There's no specific Vaganova certification that's outside of that one?

Pamela
Yeah. You can go to the Vaganova Academy.

Maia
Okay, but that has to be in person?

Pamela
Yeah, it has to be in person at the Vaganova Academy. No one's going to Russia right now, I'm pretty sure. Right? Okay. Again, the online programs, I don't feel like ... You need to have a body that you're working on, and you need to have other people around with other eyes and everybody commenting on things rather than you sit online. I guess I related that to, I had a couple instructors who have taken the ABT course online.

Yeah. And when I asked them, why do you do it that way? They have no idea. You know, they were like, well, that's because that's what they told us it was.

And it's just, Vaganova is just broken down so intrinsically. Okay. It's very hard to teach American students because the system was built on perfect dancers that were hand selected and auditioned.

And when we get dancers in our studios, you're getting whoever wants to come and dance. So it's always been a struggle of how to make that system work for everyday dancers.

Maia
Yeah, that was going to be my next question. Is that even possible? Because being the Casual Dance Teachers podcast, I'm coming from this place of typically only seeing my ballet students for about one hour, maybe two hours a week of ballet. Can you even like...

Pamela
Can you even?

Maia
Yeah, can you even?

Pamela
So my studio personally, we have very few students because no one wants to deal with coming in and learning it this correctly.

Maia
Yeah, that's not the way.

Pamela
They want to do all the jumps and the tricks and that's just not part of the program. But they have grade A. So you're supposed to get finished grade A in one year. But that means you're coming five or six days a week for several hours a day.

So I went back and I did grade A-1, grade A-1.5, grade A-2. And it took kids about four years to get through one year.

Maia
Okay, gotcha.

Pamela
And then if you can keep them that long, then they get hooked. And they can see that their training is different than other people.

Maia
Oh, yeah.

Pamela
And then when you say, okay, now you're finally going to level B, they want to come three or four times a week. So then you can progress through the system better.

Maia
Okay. So can you give any examples from working with these students? Like, obviously, I can kind of glean from what you're saying, a potential downside if you are trying to run a business is it's hard in this day and age to retain students if you're moving at a slower pace, just because of TikTok culture and what have you. But the benefit is long term, better technique. Do you have any more specific examples, ways that you see your students benefiting from sticking with this one specific program long term?

Pamela
Well, usually if by the time they are into B level, or the end of B, if they go audition for summer places, they can walk in, they feel confident that they know what they're doing.

So and we do give written tests. Okay. We give verbal tests and written tests and physical tests.

Maia
Do you think it makes a difference in the professional ballet that my ignorance is showing here 100%? But does it make a difference in the professional world if you are going to audition for, you know, some of the major ballet companies to be a Vaganova trained ballet dancer versus having like, more of a mishmash of ballet training growing up?

Pamela
So by the time you're auditioning professionally, you've, okay, if you have your Vaganova training, all the other systems, you can also pick up things. Because you know, if you're going to audition for something that's more Balanchine, yeah, you might be a great Vaganova dancer, but you better know how to move fast. So at that point, you need to learn a touch of everything. But you've got your foundation. Yeah, okay. So it's like, you know, if you have this beautiful cake, you can put any decorations on top as long as it tastes good.

Maia
Yes, I love that. Yeah, so that actually, I probably should have asked this question first. For people listening that are like, what is Vaganova? Whoopsie. I'm like going all over the place. So let's go back to that. Can you talk a little bit about within the curriculum within the training? Where are we starting from? What are the most important elements that make a Vaganova dancer?

Pamela
So when we start, everybody pretty much starts kids way too young in this country. They want their two-year-olds to take ballet. That is absolutely impossible. If your child is seven, eight, or nine, and you're putting them at a bar, it's two hands to the bar, and a lot of work is in parallel.

Then when you finally get to some rotation, everything is learned in a la seconde first. Because if your placement to second is correct, front and back is going to follow suit. But if you start letting kids point their feet front, and their hips are all twisted and crooked.

So let's just stick two hands, and until you get your hips perfectly square with some concept of a rotator and how to stand with your pelvis, what's the point in going any farther? And again, that's slow, slow going. But we really don't keep them at the bar very long at all. A lot of the ones that we have that are six, seven, or eight, nine, we need them to learn musicality.

Because you could be the greatest technical dancer, but not have any musicality. And you see that on stage all the time. She looks absolutely perfect, but she's just not there.

So I don't know. Did I get sidetracked there?

Maia
No, no, not at all. That's exactly the type of thing that I'm looking for.

Pamela
And I go crazy because in Vaganova, you have to use your head. Everything you do has a specific head movement. And I don't think a lot of teachers emphasize that.

And when you go to a theater, most people are not educated. They're looking at the dancers from the waist up, because it looks pretty. And if their head is just sitting there, that whole line is gone.
So definitely, we use the head a lot more.

Maia
When do you start training that? Because as a ballet dancer or ballet teacher myself, I have to say that's an area where I really struggle. Because when my dancers are first starting out, I feel like, oh, it's too much to introduce the head.

They are already trying to deal with the hips and the feet and all of that. And then at some point, I will go, oh, shoot, they're getting a little bit older and they don't know what to do with their head. So can you tell me what you do for that?

Pamela
I mean, it's back to, they're doing it so slowly. Everything, like, Vaganova does everything in eight counts. Like your first tendus to the side are four counts out, four counts in.

Maia
Yeah.

Pamela
Yeah. You know, then the next year, you get two counts out, two counts in. The next year, one and one.

The next year and one. And the next year and a one. So it's back to, do they really want to stand there that slowly? No.

But they can incorporate the head because they have time. If you have time, you do the tendu, bring it home. Okay, now let's turn our head.

And we have the seven movements of head tilted, dropped, lifted. So they practice all the head movements. And then eventually they just, they work.

They work together. But it's the same thing. If you just do one part and three years from now you say, oh, plunk the head on top of that.

It needs to all grow together. You know?

Maia
Yeah.

Pamela
It's like, well, when you do port de bras, you're doing like half port de bras with beginners.

Maia
Yeah.

Pamela
So when you bring your arms up to first, your head is already tilted.

And when you open the arms, your head is already turned profile. So I don't know. I used to put stickers inside their hands. You know, or, you know, stamps or anything you can do inside their hands. And they have to just keep looking inside their hands on port de bras. Just, you know, anything. People do all kinds of stuff.

Maia
Yeah. I do also want to circle back to what, basically, like the reason why you said you pursued the Vaganova training from the get-go was just a lack of training for teachers from the ped... Oh, no. What's this word?

Pamela
What's the matter?

Maia
Logical. Pedagogy.

Pamela
Pedagological.

Maia
Yeah.

Pamela
It's just, again, you can be a great dancer. That doesn't make you a great dance teacher.

Maia
Right. Exactly. So are there specific benefits? Like, what benefit, I guess, have you found from having a system in place? Can you speak to that a little bit? How it can benefit dance teachers to work from that place?

Pamela
Well, again, if you go by the syllabus, you know what you're doing in every class. You've got a complete syllabus written out for you.

And you know, on day one, I work on this. So you don't have to go crazy thinking, oh, what should we do today? Yes. I mean, yes, when you get to center, you make up your own combinations.

But you have to use what you learned at the bar. So you're just repeating what was in the syllabus at the bar. So I just think the consistency makes it better for an instructor.

You don't have to pull from a million things. Just like, OK, yesterday we worked on this. OK, guess what we're working on today? The same thing.

So I just think the consistency and having a syllabus just makes it so much easier than just trying to think about, oh, what should I teach today? Because you don't know developmentally. You've got to make sure developmentally that your children are the right age to grasp the material.

And that's already been done for you. That's already been laid out in the syllabus.

Maia
Right. Yeah. And I think for those teachers that do only see their ballet students once a week, and they have that gap in between their classes, there can be this temptation to say, like, oh, you know, we only have so many classes in the year because I only see them once a week. So we got to throw out new stuff every time.

Forgetting that it's actually even more important, probably in that sense, to have the consistency of doing a very, very similar syllabus every week when you see them, because there's going to be those gaps in their own memory, their muscle memory.

Pamela
And I find that children, if you come in with the same procedure, you know, we come in, we do reverence, we go right to the floor, we do our floor exercises. They know what's coming next, and they feel comfortable with it. Right. Rather than every week, change up, change up. I mean, our kids are so wired already from everything they do, just having that consistency in the dance class.
I think they just feel more comfortable.

Maia
Yeah, I love that. Well, we are coming up on the end of our time, but I certainly want to sort of open things up.

I know you have so much more insight about this. Is there anything else that you want to share on the topic?

Pamela
Well, again, if anyone at all was interested, I'd be more than happy to meet with people. And I think we need to just have teachers, I don't know why they just feel like they're afraid to let their guard down and ask questions.

Do you know what I mean? Like the studio down the street, that instructor, she's never probably going to come up and sit with me, because, you know, I don't know why there's that standoffishness. I don't know. But I've given a million seminars where, let's just sit on the floor.

Let's go through the syllabus. Okay, you stand up, you demonstrate. We're going to manipulate your body.

We're going to talk about anatomically what's going on. And I think we just need to have little seminars like that.

Maia
So what's the best way for people to get in touch with you?

Pamela
Just email, just email me.

Maia
Okay, and I will put your email in the show notes.

Pamela
Okay, yeah, absolutely. Yeah, I mean, there's, there's what a half dozen systems. And I'm sure if you were trained in, you know, the Cecchetti people, I'm sure that they feel the same way, or RAD or any of the other systems, Bournonville. I took Bournonville classes and nearly died.

They're all jumping. Do you know what I mean? So I mean, every system has, has its best parts.

Maia
Yeah.

Pamela
And I think as a professional, you need to learn, not specifically every single one, everything, but you need to know pieces of it. But you need that one foundation. Yeah, you need to have something for your foundation and build on it.

Maia
Yeah. And that's really what I'm trying to do here. Although I have to say, I have not gotten a hold of any Bournonville people. I'm looking. I haven't found anybody that'll come talk to me about Cecchetti specifically. And I haven't even looked into trying to find someone that's Bournonville specifically, but we'll get there.

Just trying to share some different systems and, and yeah, get into the root of that. There's the whole, I mean, Balanchine has a system, Bournonville, RAD, Cecchetti. And then Vaganova was preceded by Lagat, L-E-G-A-T.

So, and then some of the Vaganova that I know is definitely the old school. Apparently the Bolshoi got together. I don't know when, in the 80s, and tried to update some of the things.

But I still do all the old, old ones.

Maia
Okay. Oh, that's good to know.

Well, thank you so much, Pamela. This has been wonderful to talk to you.

Pamela
Well, thank you very much for, you know, like I said, I don't really know that much.

I just, I've been doing this 45 years. So again, you know, after 45 years, you pretty much know the syllabus backwards, forwards.

Maia
Folks, this is Maa hopping back in just to close things out.

I want to thank you all for listening and encourage you again to join me in the Casual Dance Teachers Network Facebook group to chat about the styles of ballet or ballet techniques that you implement in your own classrooms and what your feelings are on this conversation, ballet techniques in general, just anything that we can do to add additional resources for teachers that might be discerning some additional training. I welcome you to share those there. If you're not on Facebook or you haven't already followed us on Instagram, please follow the Casual Dance Teachers podcast on Instagram and be sure to leave a review on whatever platform you're listening to the podcast on to help these conversations reach additional dance educators.

Big thanks to GB Mystical for the theme music for the show, and I will see you all next time.