Dance studies postgraduate personal statement example

Personal statement example

Once a month I DJ the social at the Lindy hop club where I have danced for four years. Over time I have noticed that the floor fills fastest not for the most famous tracks but for mid-tempo songs with a steady, unhurried swing. I started keeping a rough log of tempo, time of night and how many couples were dancing. It is not research, but it changed how I watched the room. Who joins in, who waits at the edge, and why a song can feel like an invitation are questions about bodies and communities. I want to study them properly through a Masters in Dance Studies.

My route to dance scholarship has come through history. For my undergraduate dissertation I studied dance hall culture in a Yorkshire mill town between 1928 and 1939, using the digitised local newspaper and a small collection of programmes held by the town library. I catalogued around three hundred advertisements for halls, competitions and dancing schools. I tracked how they presented dances such as the quickstep and the slow foxtrot, and how they addressed different audiences. The most interesting pattern was the language of respectability. Halls repeatedly promised 'strict tempo', supervised floors and correct instruction, which suggested that dancing was both popular and something to be managed. My supervisor pushed me to ask what the adverts could not tell me, such as how people actually moved or whether they ignored the rules. That limit became the most valuable part of the project. It showed me that the archive records intentions and anxieties more readily than movement, and that I needed better methods for thinking about embodied practice.

Reading since graduating has sharpened this. Theresa Buckland's Society Dancing helped me see fashionable ballroom dancing in England as a way of displaying class and social belonging, which gave my dissertation material a wider frame. Susan Leigh Foster's Choreographing Empathy introduced me to the idea that kinaesthetic empathy, the sense of feeling another's movement, has its own history rather than being a universal constant. I found that idea unsettling in a useful way, because it made me question my assumption that I simply 'see' what dancers at the social are feeling.

My practical experience is that of a committed amateur rather than a trained performer. I take weekly classes and have attended workshops on the history of Lindy hop at the Savoy Ballroom in Harlem. Those workshops made me think carefully about how a dance created within African American communities is taught and marketed in British church halls and function rooms. As a DJ I have also learned something about responsibility. I balance requests and keep the floor welcoming for beginners, and I make sure the music reflects the dance's roots rather than only recent remixes.

My job in a regional theatre box office has given me a different view of dance audiences. I handle bookings for touring contemporary and ballet companies and answer questions from people unsure whether a show is 'for them'. Those conversations have taught me how much access depends on language, pricing and expectation, which links back to the dance hall adverts I studied. I have also developed reliable organisational habits, managing busy shifts and accurate records, and these will support sustained independent study.

At postgraduate level I hope to combine archival work with ethnographic and movement-based approaches. I am particularly interested in how social dance communities negotiate history, ownership and belonging. I bring careful research skills, regular involvement in a living dance practice and a genuine willingness to have my assumptions challenged. I am ready to develop the theoretical grounding that my undergraduate work and my evenings on the dance floor have shown me I need.