Dance Discipline! - Manuela Veronese Style
Manuela Veronese being thanked
- Manuela Veronese
I have been teaching children in Ballet and Modern Dance, as well as Break Dance and Salsa the last 30 years. Every single year I have produced a Christmas Show and always participated in many events during the summer. I organized summer schools for children all ages every year with a dance and sports program during the mornings. I cannot say that I love children to death, but I love to teach them and to get them somewhere in life. And I have to say that I observed a curious thing throughout those years.
I started teaching children from Mijas in 1982, and in those days parents generally were reluctant to spend money for dance classes, and the people though very very nice, were quite laid back. It was therefore quite a challenge to try to approach and instill in those people my own cultural standards, distinctive knowledge, ideas and methods, including teaching them discipline, punctuality and joy for the beautiful experience that dancing is all about.
During the 90´s I started teaching in Fuengirola and I must say that in general, the students I encountered had changed. In those subsequent years, I could almost guarantee on generally encountering and working with, spoiled, at times disrespectful and usually snobbish children. This was exactly the type of youngsters, some wealthy middle-class parents brought up in those years. This was the generation of youngsters often without jobs, poorly educated, who appeared reluctant or indifferent to do or achieve anything; the youngsters who seemed to me, to be just hanging around, smoking and often were still sleeping in their childhood bedrooms in Daddy’s home even as late as up to 25 years of age.
In my opinion, I sometimes unsympathetically described them to myself, as the purposeless generation. BUT, be careful, nothing in life remains the same as things would change, and rapidly. I also observed how others as well as me, also saw this social tragedy, and you can believe me: the new generation, children born around the 2000 are brought up sooo… differently.
Suddenly they are taught to say hello, thank you, may I….. and so on. Once again you see young parents wanting good educated children. Suddenly, now you see young parents agreeing with my teaching style. And my ballet classes started to get really full again. A few years before I could count on more clients for my Aerobics and modern dance classes than ballet. Real art was required again.
I have to say at this point, that I was brought up in Germany, so my teaching style is very tough. I don´t allow anything in class and I wish to follow certain rules of behaviour in class and of course to achieve certain skills during each course. So I started holding exams each year in springtime and “Wow”, what a success this became, This is what the students needed: to show what they can do and each received a prize when they were the best.
So everybody wanted to succeed and they made a huge effort to be the best. My shows began to be ever so successful and everybody loved them. Children learned to work hard and achieve something. And, the parents would stick to my ballet school because they believed that this was the correct additional education their children needed, and they would not give in when their child did not want to come for a while. These thing can happen when the children are small. There comes a moment where they get bored and where they think it is all the same every day. But if you insist and go on, you will find out that you will get such perfectionism and beauty in your movements which you can only experiment when you work long and hard enough. There parents are required to help. So, from that stage onwards, I could count on the same students for many years. This gave me the opportunity to really prepare them. So it came to the point where many of them became professional dancers or teachers.
Anyway, what I actually wanted to point out with this comment is, that our young generation of parents understood that it makes no sense to hang around, not being successful and that it is ever so important to give our children a well thought-out education in the long term and not giving in to them with material things all the time.
Old values are still required!. And I have to say: it works! Parents want to be proud again of how clever and well educated their children can be and not on how cool they appear to be. info@popacademia.com www.popacademia.com
Manuela is currently rehearsing with her dancers for a special Gala event on the 4 June 2011 to be held at the exclusive Hotel Villa Padierna near Marbella by The Children for Peace Onlus, an international charity dedicated to helping children in need, based in Rome. The glamorous Gala, with famous stars and celebrities, is organized by it’s energetic President Debbi Mace, and the Vice-President Lamia Khashoggi, and Manuela is working with them, to ensure its success in raising funds for the charity.
Rome@thechildrenforpeace.com www.thechildrenforpeace.com
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