Ruby Ginner Awards 2024
Milton Keynes, 3 November 2024
I was extremely pleased and honoured to be invited to the Ruby Ginner Awards. I had never been before and it was an extremely interesting day. The event is held by the Imperial Society of Teachers of Dancing (ISTD) Classical Greek Faculty. The ISTD is about 120 years old and exists to advance excellence in dance teaching and education.
The event was quite different to the previous performance that I had attended, as the other one was a festival of Classic Greek Dance, where the participants had come with ready-prepared pieces. At the end of that day, one set of awards were presented.
At today’s show, I felt as if I had joined the cast of Fame (for those of a certain age who remember the film!) For each class, the dancers congregated on stage and were led by a teacher who taught them a dance there and then. The dancers firstly performed in their class group, and then in lines of four so we could more easily judge each participant. Awards were given to each group, rather than one set of awards being presented at the end of the day.
There were four different awards for each of the classes that I saw: Class Award; Musicality Award; Performance Award; and Joy of Dance Award.
I was particularly good at spotting who would win the Joy of Dance Award as some of the children were just beaming happiness and this award was for a competitor who demonstrated exuberance and sheer enjoyment.
The Class Award was for strong technique, including correctly using Classical Greek lines, good coordinaton, and an understanding of relaxation and movement dynamics. Ginner-Mawer were very emphatic that relaxation was an important part of movement, including in Irene Mawer’s mime technique.
The Musicality Award was for a dancer showing a strong musical awareness, ie, accuracy, timing, response to rhythms and tempos, atmosphere and musical dynamics.
I would think that Irene Mawer might have been interested in the award for Performance. This was for those who could show expression through both face and body – including dramatic development and/or the ability to characterise movement where appropriate.
I wish I had arrived earlier so that I could have seen the smaller children. If I am able to attend in the future, I will go at the beginning of the day and watch how the younger ones are taught.
Going to these events is really helping me to understand more about Classical Greek Dance and I look forward to the next one. Thank you ISTD and Classical Greek Dance Network.
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Next year (2025), I intend to publish my book about Irene Mawer. The initial platform that I will use will be Kickstarter. Please do have a browse around it in advance to see how it works. And please share this blog post. Thank you.
https://www.kickstarter.com/discover/categories/dance
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