Enable Emma McWhinnie to attend the English National Ballet School Summer Course 2019
Emma successfully auditioned for the ENBS Summer Course. We need help to get her to London so that she can take up this amazing opportunity.
Wellington
Emma is 15 years old and has been dancing for 10 years. Mary Rodgers has taught her ballet since 2010. In 2014 she joined Hutt City Dance Centre, learning jazz and then contemporary. In 2018 the Royal New Zealand Ballet accepted her into their Mentor Programme and the New Zealand School of Dance accepted her into their Scholars and Associates Programmes. She has again been accepted into all three programmes for 2019. At Mary's suggestion, Emma, through hard earned paper run money paid for a Summer School at Annette Roselli's Dance Academy in Brisbane in January 2019, where she had the opportunity to audition for the English National Ballet School's Summer Course in July 2019. She was successful!
We would love to enable her to take up this wonderful opportunity. As we can not make this happen without some financial assistance, we have therefore decided to extend the invitation to you to help us get Emma to ENBS in London!
This life changing event will be four weeks of hard work where Emma will get a small taste of what a career in ballet would be like. She will be one step closer to her goal of dancing professionally. She will be tutored by a team of excellent teachers alongside dancers from all over the world. Dancing at this level requires commitment, discipline and courage when under constant critique. Emma loves the challenge!
We envisage that the trip to ENBS will cost a minimum of $NZ10,000. As well as continuing her paper run, Emma has taken on a part time job helping out at our local dance shop, Dancestop. She is also looking for other part time work or ways to fundraise. She has some money saved and will continue to save hard for her trip, but we will be extremely grateful to anyone who would like to help her out.
When Emma is not dancing, working or studying towards NCEA Level 2, she likes to be outdoors, cross training with some tramping, birding or volunteering with conservation groups.
Diane Hobday's involvement (page creator)
We are Emma's parents and want to assist her to attain her goal of dancing professionally.
Use of funds
All contributions will be used for flights to and from London, ENBS course fees and accommodation in London. If unforeseen circumstances arise that mean Emma cannot go, funds raised will go towards Emma's dance fees and gear.
Latest update
For those interested in the ballet class details 19 August 2019
Hi everyone
I loved my time at the English National Ballet School. I was there for four weeks, as were friends that I made from Ireland and Canada. I enjoyed meeting students from all over the world including England, Australia, USA, Mexico, Italy, Malta, Spain, France, Switzerland and Japan. Some students opted to only do two weeks so my class had some different people each week, the size of the class fluctuating between twenty-one to twenty-six girls and four to nine boys.
Every morning we had a ballet class followed by repertoire. Once or twice a week we would have coaching, contemporary, choreography, flamenco, dance history and music appreciation. Every Friday we would do a small showing of some classwork and repertoire for the other classes. I loved the ballet, repertoire, coaching and contemporary and I enjoyed the choreography more than I expected. Flamenco isn't really a style I enjoy dancing that much but the teacher, Lucia Caruso from Brazil, was heaps of fun. I found the theory classes a little bit dull but parts of the content were interesting.
For ballet, repertoire and coaching we had a different teacher each week. We also had a different theme set by the school. Week one was the Romantic era, two was the Classical era, no one can remember if we had a theme for week three, and four was Balanchine. Juan Eymar from Spain was our teacher for the first week. We learned the entrée from the peasant pas de deux from Giselle. Taina Morales from Cuba was our teacher for the second week. She taught us the pas de six from Swan Lake. In the third week, our teacher was Françoise Thouveny-Doyle from France. At the end of the fourth week, parents and siblings were invited to our performance. My class performed Balanchine inspired classwork set by our teacher, Josephine Holling from England, as the Balanchine trust wouldn't let us do any actual repertoire.
I'm extremely grateful to everyone who helped me to get over to London to attend the Summer Course. I loved every minute of the experience. I was sad on the last day knowing I wasn't going back the next week. I really enjoyed being able to dance full time for that long.
Thank you again to everyone for their contributions and support. I'm very grateful to you all!
Emma
Latest donations
Who's involved?
Page Q&A
Ask a question hereAny concerns?
Report this pageThank the donor
Your message will be displayed on the page and emailed to the donor.
Your new message will also be emailed to the donor.
Saving a blank entry will delete the current comment.