Thom Hecht

Emotionally Intelligent Ballet Training- Facilitating Emotional Intelligence in Vocational Dance Training Thom Hecht

Emotionally Intelligent Ballet Training (EIBT) provides a research-based compendium of learning and teaching activities and offers a way forward for ballet teachers and student dancers seeking to improve their social and emotional learning and teaching tools, to enhance the quality of vocational dance training and to foster artistic, social and technical competence. Learning and teaching ballet at the highest level puts great demands on the individual. Student dancers must cope with their own expectations and career goals alongside the intense demands of traditional authoritarian ballet pedagogy. Ballet teachers are under pressure to foster, nurture and teach ballet to highly talented adolescents in mental and physical preparation for a successful career in dance, an extremely competitive profession. This book explores the emotional aspects of learning and teaching ballet at elite dance conservatoires using an inductive-deductive research methodology, outlining the potential of applying the concept of social and emotional learning and teaching in a dance-specific context. This work will interest not only dance scholars, but also ballet teachers and student dancers in vocational training institutions. At present, EIBT is the only programme that uses emotional intelligence theories in a dance educational context, bringing emotional learning and teaching to the centre of dance education.