Dance personal statement example

Why do you want to study this course or subject?

What keeps pulling me back to dance is how much information a body gives away before anyone speaks. I noticed it first watching the queue at the garden centre café where I work on Saturdays: people shifting weight, holding a tray at arm's length, softening when they finally sit down. I started copying those small shapes in my bedroom, stretching them out, and found they could carry a whole phrase. That is the kind of work I want to do properly, with better technique behind it and people to argue with about it.

My school did not offer dance, so most of what I know has come from a weekly subsidised contemporary class, free online classes, and reading whatever the library could order in. Reading Jonathan Burrows's A Choreographer's Handbook changed how I rehearse; his habit of asking plain questions about why a decision was made stopped me filling time with movement I had not thought about. I am now interested in how choreography is documented and passed on, because so much of what I love only exists in recordings and other people's descriptions.

I want a degree that gives me sustained daily technique, contact with several choreographic approaches, and the theoretical vocabulary to write about what I see. I am realistic that my training is uneven and that I will need to work hard on release technique and floorwork in particular. I would rather be stretched by teachers and a company of dancers than continue guessing alone in a hall with a tripod.

How have your qualifications and studies helped you to prepare?

My BTEC Extended Diploma in Performing Arts has given me the closest thing to structured practical training available locally. Units in performance skills and devising taught me to work to a brief, keep a rehearsal log and take direction without losing my own ideas. For a group devising unit I took responsibility for the movement sections of a piece about a bus depot, translating our interviews with drivers into repeated gestures of checking, waiting and turning. Learning to teach those phrases to classmates with no dance background taught me to break material down and to be patient with different bodies.

Studying A-level English Literature alongside has been more useful than I expected. Close reading trained me to notice structure and repetition, which is exactly what I do when analysing a dance recording frame by frame. Writing essays under time pressure has also made me quicker at organising an argument, something I needed when preparing an evaluation of my own choreography for coursework.

Outside qualifications, I have kept a training notebook for two years, recording corrections from my community class and what I could not yet do. Working through beginners' ballet online improved my turnout and alignment, though I know self-directed work has limits and I have picked up habits that will need correcting. I have also read Judith Mackrell's Reading Dance and used public library access to watch archived performance footage, which is how I first encountered work by DV8 and by Akram Khan.

What else have you done to prepare outside of education, and why are these experiences useful?

Last spring I hired a church hall for four Sunday mornings at eight pounds an hour, paid for from my café wages, to make a fifteen-minute solo. I wanted to see whether I could sustain material without a teacher setting tasks for me. I filmed every rehearsal on a borrowed phone, watched the footage the same evening and wrote down two things to change. The piece ended up about sixty per cent shorter than my first draft, because I could see how much I was repeating myself. Editing my own work down was the hardest and most useful part.

For the past year I have helped at a Thursday movement session for seven to ten year olds at my local youth centre. I lead the warm-up, invent games that hide technical ideas inside them, and calm arguments about who stands at the front. One girl who refused to join in for weeks now demonstrates the travelling exercise. Working with children has made me far clearer in how I give instructions and much better at reading a room's energy.

My café job involves long shifts on my feet, closing on my own and handling complaints politely when the kitchen is behind. It has built stamina and reliability, and it funds my classes and hall hire. I also stage manage occasionally for the college's smaller shows, which gave me a view of performance from the wings and an appreciation of how much depends on people who are never seen. I come to this course used to organising my own time and prepared for a demanding timetable.

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