When you think of a summer dance intensive, you might not immediately picture a college campus. But many top dance faculties are hosts summer programs:which can offer a chance for overall growth and often functions as an overview of life as a student. A summer on campus can help high school students plan for their futures—whether at the same school or elsewhere in the dance world.
A taste of student life
The college dance student experience includes much more than just studio time. It also includes residential and social life, interaction with non-dance students, relationships with faculty, and approaching dance from an academic perspective. Like many intensive college courses, “our summer program is based and structured in conjunction with the BFA program,” says Boston Conservatory of Berkeley Associate Professor of Dance Curt Douglas. “It mimics what a first-year student would experience.”
Students in Berklee’s Summer Dance Intensive, for example, are offered a range of technical classes as well as the opportunity to work with guest choreographers. “Students get a chance to really immerse themselves in the choreographic process, which is one of the big elements of the conservatory program,” Douglas says. At the Philadelphia University of the Arts, in addition to movement- and improvisation-based classes, students at its Summer Institute are exposed to “workshops focused on critical dance studies, speaking and writing, formulating feedback, and examining contemporary artists,” says UArts School of Dance Associate Dean Jen McGinn. “There is a wider understanding of dance as an academic subject that many of them are not as familiar with from their previous dance training.”
As in college, hard work is tempered with socializing. In both the Berklee and UArts summer programs, dancers live in dorms alongside students in other arts programs and participate in planned trips and activities together in the evenings and on weekends. McGinn says residential life at UArts pushes high school students to gain an important sense of independence and responsibility that will help them prepare to move away from home. “We’re in downtown Philadelphia, and they’re treated like adults in the sense that even though they have an RA and an evening class, they walk from building to building on the streets of the city and make sure they make it to mealtimes,” she says. .
Preparing for the future
The question many students ask themselves when considering a college summer intensive is whether it will increase their chances of getting into that school. “It definitely helps us get to know them differently and better, just because we have a lot more time with them,” McGinn says. For rising seniors attending the UArts Summer Institute, participation in the program itself counts as an audition for the BFA program. Berklee does things a little differently, holding an audition for the BFA program during the third week of the Summer Intensive. “For the first two weeks, they can use the studio space for rehearsals and that way they don’t have to come back to re-audition later in the year,” Douglas says.
While some students attend a college summer intensive with the goal of enrolling at that school, others may be focused on earning a bachelor’s degree outside of dance or auditioning for companies. Summer students in the UArts program attend a required two-hour workshop called Dance After High School that helps them understand the opportunities available to them after graduation. “We get in as much as we can,” McGinn says. “Do you even have to go to college? What is the difference between a BFA and a BA, the difference between being on the dance team and being a major or minor? It’s less about pointing them in a direction than being a resource.”
Douglas agrees that whatever your dance goals are for the future, intensive college training can help. “In this collegial space, the goal is to educate the students so that it’s not just about this particular technique or this choreographer’s style,” he says. “You get a 360-degree experience of what it means to be a dancer in today’s world.”