PRESENTS: The Dance Studio Owner Master Class Online Bridging The Gap Between Technique And Technology Annie McQuitty Annie is the Director and Founder of DANCE EXCELLENCE a global event that aims to inspire dancers and teachers to fulfill their artistic dreams and desires through education and performance. Annie has been honored to receive over 10,000 dancers from 18 countries on 4 continents including: Australia, Belgium, Canada, Cyprus, England, Germany, Gibraltar, Ireland, Japan, Mallorca, Northern Ireland, Philippines, Portugal, Russia, Scotland, Singapore, Switzerland, and the United States of America during her annual by invitation only event. If you ve set a goal to be a studio of excellence that takes pride in representing your state and nation at a global dance event this is a must attend call! TOPIC: On Being Excellent: How Dance Studio Owners Are Transforming The Global Conversation of Dance. Annie McQuitty Dance Excellence Suzanne Gerety: Today I m joined by Annie McQuitty. Annie is the director and founder of Dance Excellence, a global event that aims to inspire dancers and teachers to fulfill their artistic dreams and desires through education and performance. Annie has been honored to receive over 10,000 dancers from 18 countries on four continents including Australia, Belgium, Canada, Cypress, England Germany, Gibraltar, Ireland, Japan, Majorca, Northern Ireland, Philippines, Portugal, Russia, Scotland, Singapore, Switzerland, and the United States of America during her annual, byinvitation-only event. It is my pleasure to say hello, Annie. The topic of our conversation today is called On Being Excellent: How Dance Studio Owners Are Transforming the Global Conversation of Dance. Welcome. 1
Annie McQuitty: Hi, Suzanne. It is wonderful to be with you here. It s awesome, Annie. Before we even get started with the first question, I want to say that what is special to me is that I came to Dance Excellence I believe in 1992. I was probably a freshman in high school. I have such fond memories of Dance Excellence when we represented our state, so I feel like everything has come full circle to where we are now. Welcome! I love that. You know, we just finished our 2009 season a couple of weeks ago and there were several directors representing their home states and countries who had actually been dancers ten or 15 years ago at Dance Excellence. It is so thrilling for me to see these kids that are all grown up now and are really successful, beautiful teachers. That s awesome. It is happening a lot. It is; that is really great. For our listeners today who may not have heard about your international festival, tell us exactly what Dance Excellence is. Dance Excellence is a week-long event. It is by-invitation-only. It is like a week of party, celebration, classes, learning, and study for dancers truly from all over the world. We know now that it is difficult for young dancers to earn a living just by being ballerinas or just by being hip-hoppers. Really, you need to do it all. When they come to Dance Excellence, everyone has to take voice lessons; everyone takes improv and acting; everyone takes auditioning workshops so they learn how to slate and they learn how to do a proper, professional audition. It takes all the fear out of it because they have already experienced it here. The week is full of classes. From the time they get up until the time they go to bed they are in classes or in performance. We do a week here in Los Angeles because this is really is the heart of entertainment. We have the opportunity to bring people in from television and motion pictures as well as dance and live entertainment. All of our Master Teachers are master teachers from all over the world 2
as well as industry professionals. These are people you can only get by being here in Los Angeles. Everyone is invited to do performances at Disneyland which is a thrill if you are from outside of the United States. Also, the kids from here love to perform at Disneyland. We also do a full day of international performance boards. That is a day of performance we held this past year at the big Terrace Theater in Long Beach, California. For many of our kids it is their first opportunity to perform on a truly world-class stage. This is especially true of our kids who come from Europe and have performed a lot, but not necessarily on a beautiful, huge, grand stage. They do a whole day of performances with absolutely no competition. They spend the whole week becoming friends, developing their network, and cheering for each other. At the end of the week they are still cheering for each other and they are all doing performances for each other. That is the one thing that Dance Excellence is not; we are not a dance competition. We truly are a festival and the kids do performances on Friday for performance boards. There is an adjudication panel, so they get some critique. However, there is no competition. We could have all number ones or we could have all third place; we could have all outstandings or all honorable mentions. That is the one thing that is a little bit difference with Dance Excellence. That is what sets you guys apart and makes you unique. I m sure year after year, this is what the people coming back enjoy about Dance Excellence, obviously. People are curious about how you became the director of this great annual event. It s funny because it was all completely by accident. It was never a planned business. About 25 years ago I was the associate producer for a group called The Young Americans. I was producing choir competitions and dance competitions for this organization. It just broke my heart that at the 3
end of each event, everyone would be so disappointed except for the winning group. I decided I didn t want to work in competition anymore and I wanted to really help the kids support each other and work that network. My husband said, Why don t you just do something that is noncompetitive. With my husband s encouragement, we started this festival concept 19 years ago. With our first Dance Excellence we had two groups with 42 kids, and we invited one dance studio from each of the 50 states. We felt that by doing it by invitation, the directors would feel they were spending the week with their contemporaries, but not just their neighbors; not the studio director next door. It worked! The first year we had 42 kids. Then we opened it up to international groups about 16 years ago. I was a coward, so we started with English speakers. The first group we invited was from Australia and they came and launched Dance Excellence into the global world. Now we invite dance studios and directors from four continents. We actually divide the countries around the world into their states, regions, and provinces as well. We have many counties from England that are represented; many states from Australia that are represented; and we are looking forward to opening new countries for 2010. That s awesome; that s great, Annie. I love that. It is so much fun! We really have two missions with Dance Excellence. The first is to give the directors and the studio owners, the men and women that are really running businesses, an opportunity to be together; to find fellowship, retreat, and to be restored. We really try to fill them up because they are the ones out there working day in and day out, year in and year out. They are the ones that can suffer burnout, so we really want to restore the teachers here at Dance Excellence. Then we send them back to their studios. Of course, the second mission is to bring the kids together. We want to open their eyes to all the different opportunities in the entertainment industry that they might not get at their small studio in Wyoming or their small studio in a village in Scotland. Absolutely. That s awesome; I love it. As you said, it is the global coming together. I think that s awesome. In your opinion, what makes 4
a dance studio excellent? What makes a studio one that you would invite to represent their state at Dance Excellence? That is such a great question. What makes a studio excellent? We look for studio directors because it is truly the director who is invited to represent their state or country. Through the audition process or company process some directors open it up to their home studio they choose who gets to come to Dance Excellence for the week. It is the director who is our delegate and we look for directors who have an open mind, who have a curriculum that has a lot of opportunity in it. They are not just a hip-hop school, for instance. Although, we have actually had some ballet studios, schools, and academies come even from the Philippines. They truly are a ballet school, but when those kids arrive, they put on their little sneakers and they go into a beginning tap class. Their teacher has an open mind and recognizes that they may have a budding or potential tapper in their group even though all they teach is ballet. We look for studio directors who are open and who have a very high standard of training. We look for teachers that are really master teachers; they are good, good teachers and have strong studios. I love that. One of the things we just added to the dance studio on our Web site was an Eligibility Requirement Department with the purpose of finding for your own studio what will allow a student to pass onto the next level. This brings me back to the question about the performance boards. You sit down and say what the criteria are for the evaluation. It is not a first, second, and third prize where only one person walks away. What are you using to gauge those performance boards or what levels of criteria are you using? We had a panel of three adjudicators. This was new for us this year and I want to share this concept because I think the teachers have really loved going home with this. At each adjudicator station, we set up a camera. The adjudicator is not only speaking through the entire piece enabling you to hear what they are seeing, but you are also getting the DVD of it. You see exactly what they re talking about and you get positive ideas about how to improve the piece even more. 5
The criteria are on technical execution. We use a ten-item guide for the adjudicators to talk about. It is about performance, the technical aspect, the level of the choreography, and the originality of the choreography. Of course, it includes costuming and overall appearance. They use all of the criteria and then, for instance, they would give it a 90 as an excellent rating. I hope that answers the question. That s great. That is like the definition of constructive criticism in the sense that they have the footage to go back and refer to. Professional athletes do this all the time. They watch their film, so to speak. As dancers, we should be doing that more. Absolutely. We should be filming and taking the time in class to say, Let s watch it again on tape. As we all know, the tape doesn t lie. Absolutely. It is such a positive growth experience. The adjudicators this year were so impressed with the quality of dance that is out there now. I think a lot of that has to do with what the kids and the teachers see even on television worldwide. When you have shows like You Think You Can Dance out there pushing excellent, high quality dance, they see that and are being inspired by it. It is very much the snowball affect. We are seeing better and better dance worldwide because of their exposure. That is premise, the background, and the theme of our teleseminar series of which you are a part. It is bridging the gap between technique and technology. Technology is growing and changing at a rapid pace. Have you seen technology impact dance studios around the world? Technology has impacted it so much. Even here at Dance Excellence, when we communicated with all of our directors around the world, we used to do everything by mail. They could have it in their hands and take it, if necessary, to have it translated into their home language. We found that mail is not working around the world. Several of the invitations we sent a year and a half ago were returned to us three 6
months later saying, Undeliverable. Here in the United States, we are blessed with a mail system that really works; it s a great system. However, this is not the case worldwide; it is not global. Here at Dance Excellence, we have gone to a completely e-mail, Internet system because everybody, every dance teacher around the world has access to e-mail; it is amazing and it is quick. You can answer them and get them assistance so fast. I would say that the Internet has really, really changed even our correspondence level at Dance Excellence. It is easier to help people quickly. That s absolutely true. It s funny that we talked about English being my first and only language. I am always in awe of those who are bilingual or multi-lingual. I love the simple translating tools that are free online. I have a member who is French and she has a challenge with the language. She desperately wants to be in communication with us and we are able to do that now. We translate our e-mail on a free Yahoo thing called Babelfish. She says to me, Suzanne! Please help me translate. I take her French, paste it into Babelfish, read it, and respond back and translate it back into French. It is brilliant because she is helping me grow. She is from some obscure part of the world and it is just cool. I love that about it. It s fabulous! I am so amazed at that, too. We always have wonderful groups come from Japan and the kids do pretty well. They study English in their regular school day in Japan. If we really need to get a message across, we write it down because they all read English beautifully even if they don t understand our dialect. They read it and then they go get the answer. The kids are really fearless about the language barrier. They find ways to Google each other and text each other and do the translations even with texting. The kids are really fearless; they really are. I drug my feet for years and said, No! No! How can I have hundreds of kids come that I can t talk to? It is not a problem at all. It is amazing how small our earth now seems to me where 15 years ago I was really afraid to go outside of my little United States borders. Now 7
I look at the global map and I think, Yeah, we ve never had anyone from French Guinea. We need to do that. It is awesome. That is the beauty behind dance. It is such a global language. We can all speak dance. That leads me to my next question. What do you think are the most intangible things that studios or directors of dance take away when they have participated in Dance Excellence? I think it is all about the relationships. They come; they rub elbows; they are in classes. One of the most important moments at Dance Excellence is not in a dance class; it is in the dining room. We do a lot of mixers, activities for the kids, workshops for the kids to actually get to know one another. I think the most important things that Dance Excellence has to offer are the relationship-building and being exposed to the different cultures around the world. I have learned so much in the last five or six years working with many different languages and cultures. There is no wrong way and no right way; there are just a lot of different ways to approach everything. I think our world, especially for our kids, is going to become so small. Our neighbors are going to be in France and in Germany and in China. I think that is the most important thing that the kids and the directors take away from Dance Excellence. Dance is just a vehicle. Dance is the thread that brings them all together and knits them all together. These people all love dance so much. Absolutely. That s awesome, Annie. I want to ask you if there is anything else you want to share with our listeners today that you think would make a difference for them. Perhaps it is a little bit about you or about Dance Excellence. Is there anything else you want to share? I just appreciate this opportunity to spend this time with you, Suzanne. I want you to know that I support what you and Kathy are doing tremendously. I think the is such a great vehicle for studio owners to find support. The challenges and the joys that studio owners feel around the globe are all the same. I hear the same challenges on all different continents and different languages. They have the same joys. 8
I appreciate that you guys are putting together this vehicle for everyone to be able to communicate. I applaud. I think this is wonderful. We are always looking for beautiful studios from around the world to put on our invitation list. We have some countries where we have an invitation waiting list of three or four years because we still only invite one from each of the states or provinces from their country. We are always looking for new countries and always looking for beautiful studios. The only reason we have grown is by recommendation. Most of our new studios that attend each year are recommended from a director that has attended previously. If anybody out there is interested in Dance Excellence, come and find us on our Web site. Do you mind if I tell them what it is? I want you to. Please, do. It is www.defestival.com. Our e-mail address is the same except there is no l. It is just defestiva@aol.com. We welcome you to come find our Web site. Thank you again, Suzanne, for spending the time with me. This has been awesome. Thank you, Annie. It is your generosity that helps the studio owners keep their passion for dance alive which is our commitment at. Thank you, Annie. It is always a joy and a pleasure. 9
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