Students from The Royal Ballet School and Trinity Laban Conservatoire in collaborative educational project

On Saturday, 3 December The Royal Ballet Upper School 1st Year students visited Trinity Laban Conservatoire for a day of creative workshops with their counterparts at this leading centre of music and contemporary dance training.

This is the latest development in a five month project, aDvANCE, designed to enable students of The Royal Ballet Upper School and Trinity Laban to share skills and learn from the differences in their respective dance training.

The young dancers first met on 15 October when the group from Trinity Laban visited The Royal Ballet School to watch a ballet class and participate in a first choreographic session with project leader, Toby Norman-Wright. The Royal Ballet School students paid a return visit to Trinity Laban in Deptford on 19 November, when they were amazed by the scale of the dance facilities available there.

Both organisations are funded by the Department for Education’s Music and Dance Scheme which helps to identify and assist children with exceptional potential, regardless of their personal circumstances, enabling them to benefit from world-class specialist training. The groups will work weekly at both Trinity Laban and The Royal Ballet Upper School in Covent Garden.

The project will culminate in the creation of a new collaborative performance piece which will be performed at the Linden Studio Theatre at The Royal Ballet Upper School on 2 and 3 February 2012.

Pictured: Students outside of Laban Trinity Conservatoire

Photo: Brian Slater