Melanie Berry

You can have any kind of background; there’s no audition for the course. So even if you don’t have a dance background, we’ve had a lot of people on the course that have been actors, or they have had perhaps some kind of performing arts experience, and they want to enhance their dance background.

For me, I was mainly a recreational dancer; I taught street dance; I did a lot of street dance but had never studied contemporary technique. So for me, I had developed a real fondness for dance but decided that I wanted to pursue it more formally. But, because I’m a little bit older, a lot of the other avenues that you can get in to dance are shut down once you reach a certain age; whereas the DDS here at Trinity Laban is one of the places you can come as a more mature student and certainly as someone who is accessing dance a bit older than you would traditionally do it; and you can be trained and have really good technique training.

I think about learning contemporary technique, but not that in isolation; the core subjects that you do on the DDS – choreological practice and choreography are just two of them that I’ve done so far – they really all feed in, so they all link quite nicely. I think it’s been really rewarding seeing my progress in technique class but also being able to use the information that I’m getting from other subjects to feed into my practice and improve as a dancer.

I think the teaching staff here are really high calibre and I think that’s one of the things for me that’s really stood out at Trinity Laban. It’s not just the information they can give you – their expertise is amazing – but it’s also the pastoral care they provide as well. You feel really like you’re valued as an individual and as a whole person. It is all about dance, but then it’s not just about dance; I really feel like I’m considered as a whole person and I think that is quite unique: you don’t find that in a lot of tertiary settings and I think it’s really special.