Dance Professor and Students to Present at Royal Academy of Dance Conference

Associate Professor of Dance Delia Neil will present a workshop at the Royal Academy of Dance international conference on September 4. Dance students Leah Adams and Brandy Brown will serve as the workshop demonstrator in the online presentation.

The Royal Academy of Dance describes the virtual conference, Mapping Dance and Dance Teaching: Past(s), Present and Future(s), as an effort “to bring together practitioners, teachers, educators, and researchers to debate and interrogate the past, present, and future of dance and teaching.” Presenters come from Europe, Canada, Asia, the United Kingdom, and the United States.

Neil’s presentation, “Democratic and inclusive teaching strategies for ballet technique classes in higher education: Using ballet technique to train the body for all movement styles,” will explore teaching strategies that maintain the heritage of ballet technique, but also demonstrate how developing the body through ballet technique can enhance and improve students’ movement in any style.

“As a ballet teacher in higher education for 30+ years, I have developed and employed teaching strategies for a wide range of students with differing physical capabilities,” Neil wrote in her workshop description. “Many of my students have had little to no competent ballet training, while others have been trained in professional ballet schools. Having both constituencies in one class is challenging.”

Neil is a Professional Choreographer and Master Teacher of Ballet and a certified Pilates Mat Instructor. She serves as the Undergraduate Coordinator in the Department of Dance and manages the Professional Training Certificate program with Charlotte Ballet. Neil’s choreography includes works for the concert stage, musical theatre and dramatic theatre productions, collaborative works with visual artists, as well as settings of classical ballet repertoire. In recent years, she has choreographed works for performance at the North Carolina Museum of Art (NCMA), including “An Homage to Ancient Egypt,” presented in Spring 2021 in conjunction with the museum’s Golden Mummies of Egypt exhibition. She will present a new work at the NCMA in December 2021 inspired by the work of Alphonse Mucha.

Leah Adams is a senior dance major from Charlotte who completed the Professional Training Certificate program with Charlotte Ballet. Brandy Brown is a senior dance major from Charlotte who is also completing a Minor in Women’s and Gender Studies.