The Student Dance Recital Gets No Respect. Maybe It Should

Hélène Paquet

They're often dismissed as amateur hour — but student dance recitals, those annual rites of passage in studios, may deserve more credit than they get. For many young performers, these showcases mark their stage debut. And for countless audience members, they're an unexpected gateway into the world of dance.

With the exception of prestigious institutions such as the Paris Opera School and the national conservatories in Paris and Lyon, end-of-year dance shows aren’t particularly popular. Often seen as artistically and technically lacking, they sometimes even serve as a foil against which disappointing work is compared. “You’d think we were at a school gala!” is a sentiment that can be overheard at the end of underwhelming professional performances or reads on a snarky social media post.

Yet many professional dancers consider this first experience on stage as the starting point of what became a calling. And many teachers go through tremendous effort to offer their students the very best choreography and staging. “I used to dream of being in class with the ‘older girls,’ with their tutus and neon pink leggings,” recalls Emilie Juppin with a smile. After a career as a jazz dancer, she now runs La Petite Dance School in Montreuil. Her first stage experiences were those end-of-year shows, when she says she began to “dream of dance.”

Today, she sees these performances as an integral part of her students’ training. First because they develop the dancers’ performance skills and broaden their choreographic culture, but also because they encourage them to challenge themselves technically. “Dancing a choreography that’s going to be performed in front of an audience demands commitment. Of course, we don’t want to make our students feel uncomfortable, but it can also provide extra motivation to hone in their skills, their technique, and manage their stress...”. And of course, experience the pleasure of dancing: “Bringing a show to life provides that extra sparkle for parents, families, and the main people involved– the dancers”.

But end-of-year shows aren’t just practice for future performers. When Marco da Silva Ferreira was hired as a teacher by the school where he used to dance, he realized he had to become a choreographer. “There were showcases for Christmas, and at the end of the year, in a large 2,000-seat auditorium,” recalls the now internationally-acclaimed choreographer. “I got the impression that there were a lot of expectations, not just from the teachers – there were a lot of us working to make the show really good – but also from the parents and children who spent their weekends in rehearsal.”

This is how da Silva began his career as a choreographer, which led him to become an associate artist with the National Theatre in Porto, and later with the National Choreographic Center in Caen. “I learned things that were brand-new to me: how to choreograph, how to tell a story through dance, how to create an atmosphere... With each new attempt, I understood a little better how to organize the timing, the space, and which steps were necessary to reach my goal.”

Using the framework of dance school showcases, often aimed exclusively at students and their parents, enabled him to experiment with a great deal of freedom, to combine styles, and to find his own esthetic language. He also learned about all the logistical aspects involved in designing a show, which aided his transition to professional choreographer. “I learned how many weeks of rehearsal I’d need, and I found out that each aspect of creating a piece had its own timing. I learned that, for costumes, you need time beforehand for research and fittings, while the lighting and technical work is done at the end.”

Some schools focus heavily on the artistic aspect of their student showcases. They “are capable of putting on a top-quality show, even with non-professional students,” says Juppin. “We can see what they’re capable of, and in the end, they take us along too, and we work together to create something. The whole range of emotions that can be conveyed to the audience is available. It’s not just laughter and joy, it can be quite moving as well.”

Student showcases often attract non-traditional audiences with personal ties to the performers. “The best feedback I get is when someone who’s been forced to attend by a family member leaves saying that they’ve truly enjoyed the show,” says Juppin. Pierre-Emmanuel Sorignet, a sociologist who specializes in dance, notes that for some spectators, it may be their first time at the theater. “In studios in eastern Paris, or in Seine Saint-Denis, for example, the end-of-year showcases are an opportunity for families from working-class backgrounds – who are not usually the typical audience for dance – to go to the theater to see their children. This network of municipal conservatories is one of the effects of cultural democratization.”

However, this doesn’t mean that student showcase audiences will become regular theatre-goers. “I don’t think it helps develop sufficient familiarity, nor help socialize them as future spectators,” says Sorignet. The sociologist also points to a disconnect between what’s being performed at local conservatories “where the technique and staging” are more accessible to new audiences, and the programming of the more elitist public theaters “which offer an aesthetic that’s aimed more at the middle and upper classes, for an audience that is already familiar with contemporary dance,” he laments. But when efforts are made to create bridges between these two spaces, the researcher notes that “all the young people know where the theater is in the city.”

Hélène Paquet is a freelance journalist. She works mainly on gender and equality issues, online cultures and dance, which is a passion of hers and which she has been practicing since childhood. She is also a doctoral student in sociology at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, where she has been studying media coverage of LGBT+ issues since the late 1990s.

La Petite École de danse at Montreuil
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