Name:  Iva Lesic en Leila Kester 

Department / Programme: National Ballet Academy (NBA)/ Health & Performance

Project name / working title: Hypermobility: understanding and tackling the dilemmas together  

Research group: NBA teachers

We organized a mini event "hypermobility in dance students", for NBA teachers in order to increase their knowledge in both theoretical and practical areas. The goal was to develop a shared vision, by and for teachers, on how to deal with hypermobile dance students. The mini event took place on Monday 16-05-2022. All the teachers teaching classical ballet and the artistic director were present. 

Before the event we started with arranging practical aspects of the mini event (inviting teachers, seeking information, analyzing the subject and creating the workshops).

During the mini- event Iva offered a one-hour workshop during which she focused on many different properties of hypermobility. She shared “up to date" research regarding hypermobility in dancers and as she also discussed this subject during her anatomy class with the AD 1 students and included the information she acquired from them. Afterwards, Leila Kester worked for an hour with teachers using Pilates technique which she practices as a basis to teach dancers to create a greater awareness of their bodily function. She demonstrated various exercises to teachers, explain and share her experience. Finally, during the last hour a dialogue was started with teachers during which they look into the problems they encounter when teaching hypermobile students.

The core question was whether there is a shared vision of how to train/educate the hypermobile dance students. And is this vision supported by the results of scientific research, is the vision consistent with the information currently available in the literature? The conclusion was that there is a shared vision and that the vision was supported by the results of scientific research. The teachers do find it more difficult to guide these students when teaching large classes and find that extra guidance outside the regular classes is needed. How this guidance should be organized is something the management still needs to think through.