Contemporary dance personal statement example

Why do you want to study this course or subject?

What keeps pulling me back to contemporary dance is that it has no settled vocabulary. In my Dance A-level I learned a section of a release-based solo one term and a piece built almost entirely on floor work and weight-sharing the next, and the two demanded completely different thinking from me: one asked me to let a movement finish itself, the other asked me to trust another person's body to hold mine. That range is what I want to spend three years inside. I am interested in how choreographers decide what a body should mean. Studying Sociology alongside Dance has sharpened this, because I keep noticing that the way people stand, queue, take up space or avoid touch is already learned choreography, and contemporary work can either reproduce that or interrupt it. I want to make and perform work that does the interrupting. I am also drawn to the discipline of the form. Contemporary dance looks free from the outside, but the improvisation tasks I find most productive are the ones with the tightest rules, where I am limited to one plane of movement or one point of contact. Restriction makes me inventive in a way that open choice does not. A degree appeals to me because it combines daily technical training with the chance to read, analyse and write about what I am doing, and because I would be working with people whose dancing histories are different from mine. I know I will be a stronger performer if I can also account for my choices in words, and eventually contribute to a rehearsal room as a collaborator rather than only as someone waiting to be given material.

How have your qualifications and studies helped you to prepare?

I am studying Dance, English Literature and Sociology at A-level. Dance has given me both the practical grounding and the analytical habits I rely on: I perform in a quartet we devised ourselves, and for my written work I studied Rambert repertoire and looked closely at how set, sound and light change the reading of the same movement. Learning to describe a phrase precisely, without vague adjectives, has been surprisingly difficult and useful, and it now affects how I take corrections in class. English Literature trains a similar attention. Working on dramatic texts made me think about structure, pace and where a piece places its silences, which is directly relevant to choreographic form. Close reading also taught me to defend an interpretation with evidence rather than impression, and I use that when I write rehearsal reflections. Sociology supplies the ideas I find most provocative for dance. Topics on identity, socialisation and inequality gave me language for questions I had already been circling, such as who gets to train, whose bodies are treated as neutral on stage, and how audiences are taught what counts as serious art. My GCSEs included Maths and Science, and I found the practical work in Biology genuinely helpful for understanding anatomy in technique class, particularly when a teacher explains why a placement protects a joint. Outside the syllabus I train twice a week at my dance school in contemporary and ballet technique, and I have taken Saturday workshops in Cunningham-based technique and in contact improvisation, which was my first experience of dancing with my eyes closed.

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

During February half term I spent a supervised week with a small regional contemporary company. My role was to observe and help: I signed in at reception each morning, sat quietly at the side of the studio with a notebook, laid out mats and marked out spacing tape, refilled water jugs and helped the technician coil cables after a lighting session. Twice I was allowed to stay for the choreographer's notes at the end of the day. What struck me was how ordinary and repetitive the making process was. One eight-count transition took most of a morning, and nobody seemed frustrated by that. I also saw how much of a dancer's working life is administrative and physical maintenance rather than performance, which has made me realistic about the profession rather than discouraged by it. For the past two years I have assisted at a Tuesday class for eight- to eleven-year-olds at my dance school. The teacher leads; I demonstrate, count children in, help with shoes and lost water bottles, and take a small group aside if they are struggling with a sequence. Explaining a turn to a nine-year-old has improved my own understanding of it, because I have to find three different ways to say the same thing. My Saturday supermarket job has taught me to keep working pleasantly when I am tired and to manage my time around training, and I am usually the person who volunteers to tidy the end aisles nobody wants. I also swim early twice a week for stamina, and I keep a simple journal of tasks and phrases I want to develop, some of which I have used in college improvisation sessions.

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