The Annual Victorian Dance Festival held in April at the Melbourne Showgrounds, is an excellent opportunity for recreational dancers of all ages to attend to gain dance and performance knowledge from national and international dance tutors and choreographers.
Heather Jenkins, a senior dancer at Jan Pianta School of Dance (JPSD) attended the two-day event, taking classes and workshops with many well-known choreographers and teachers, with one being Matthew Prescott from Joffrey Ballet School in New York America.
Matthew, a freelancer, having worked and performed with Dance Theatre of Harlem, The Suzanne Farrell Ballet, Madison Square Garden Performance Group with Mathew playing the role of the ‘older Billy’ in Billy Elliot film, with many more credits on his impressive list, auditioned Heather at the workshops, for a place to train at Joffrey Ballet School summer intensive in jazz and contemporary style.
Heather started classical ballet classes at JPSD as a young child, then after taking a leave of absence, returned to JPSD, igniting her passion for all things dance.
Heather now trains in classical ballet, along with jazz, contemporary, hip hop and national dance classes as well as a weekly private lesson, was thrilled to say the least, after waiting four days to receive notification of her being accepted into the Joffrey Ballet School’s summer intensive.
The decision to accept was not too difficult at all, the only difficult decision now is to select whether to attend the New York, Las Vegas, Miami or Georgia intensive in July of this year.
Principal artist director Jan Pianta along with Shaun Carr Senior artist director said Heather has certainly worked hard in all her classes after making her come back to JPSD and are excited for her in learning of the wonderful news.
