JOKSOD Summer School Recap!

Wow! What a start to the dancing year we had with our JOKSOD Summer School! It was a complete collection of fun, learning, new experiences and new friendships for everyone involved and we were so thrilled to see all the beautiful smiling faces turn up at the studio.

The two-day event began with our beautiful little beginners who had such a wonderful time learning new genres of dance that they have not had the opportunity to do before. They also got to decorate their own pointe shoes, which was a delightful activity and much fun was had by all!

Our Senior students were so lucky to receive teaching from a plethora of incredible guest teachers that we organised. This included Natalie Clarke who took them for Classical Ballet and was able to impart her extensive technical knowledge and advice. Natalie is continuing on with us to teach our JOKSOD Extension Program this year and so our students are lucky to have ongoing opportunities to learn from her expertise.

We also had JOKSOD favs, Kim Adam who taught Jazz and Ben Cure who did a beautiful Lyrical class. Both of these amazing teachers have such wonderful choreography and the students get so much out of the classes. We are also lucky enough to welcome Ben as a regular guest teacher at JOKSOD as he will be coming back throughout the term to teach.

For the very first time we also had Luke Alleva join the guest teaching team and he brought with some really exciting Broadway Musical numbers that really inspired all our students. We were delighted to see everyone was so elated after his class as they got to experience something different.

For our Junior students it was really special for us to welcome back our JOKSOD Alumni as guest teachers for the classes. It is so inspiring when the younger students get to see and learn from past students and can foresee a pathway they could also take. It’s also lovely for those Alumni teachers who feel as though they’ve come home again when they walk into the JOKSOD studio.

We are so incredibly lucky to have Amy Browne on our teaching staff who is an Assistant Manager at Bloch in Chadstone. She has such a knowledge about pointe shoes and so she conducted a workshop tutorial for our Junior and Pre-Intermediate students who will be starting pointe work very soon! She went through the anatomy of a pointe shoe, why there are so many different types, what to look for in the different shoes, how they are made and more. It was a wonderful opportunity to learn and our students had such informative questions!

It is an absolute pleasure to organise special holiday classes for our JOKSOD family and it is always beautiful to see the students back in the studio, friendships blossoming and everyone so happy to be back (despite being a bit sore after all that hard work!)

Now we can’t wait to get BACK TO DANCE in 2022 at JOKSOD!