De Montfort University Audition

Hello again universities! Wednesday was my penultimate (fun fact- that's one of my favourite words) uni audition so yay they're almost over! Overall this was no 5 out of 10 so now we're at the halfway mark, how have we survived?! Haha, it's been fun really.

To get to De Monfort I had to get a train into London, a tube to St Pancreas and then a train from there to Leicester. I feel like I'm becoming quite the British traveller from all these auditions! By going to them by myself I'm also becoming a more confident traveller too so I'm getting more from them than just the dancing.

Once I got to DMU I had to go to the campus centre to register. This time around was a bit different as Dance wasn't the only subject there, there were other subjects holding interviews too. Once we'd all registered we were taken to a lecture room got the course talk. it was interesting walking around the campus as they are the only Uni out of the 5 that I hadn't been to look round beforehand. For the same reason the talk was useful. For some reason it gave me a very sixth form vibe. After the talk, we got taken to the PACE building which is where their studios are. Here we were split into 2 groups for the audition class - very different to my other auditions where we were kept together. The studio was gorgeous! It was spacious, had a great floor, loads of natural light and big mirrors along one of the longer walls. The best studio I've seen at a Uni. The class was quite fast-paced but the lecturer broke down details a lot. DMU's way of teaching contemporary is to not teach a certain named technique such as Graham or Cunningham but to teach it the way the teacher sees contemporary. I both like and dislike this. This is good for choreography when you are exploring movement but I believe you should know and be able to recognise techniques as jobs may ask if you can do a certain one and how would you know?

The class was good and the lecturer had clearly had a few influences like ballet and release - but for sure not a particular technique. We did a few centre things then went to the corner to do runs and a jump exercise which I liked as it was very ballet-ey. At the end we did an improv task. In groups of four we had a quarter of the space to use. We started off by finding four pathways by walking and developed that into more interesting movement. We held pauses and had to respond to the other three in our space.

After the class we had a lunch break, I joined five other girls in the food hall and we chatted about the class, sixth form and dance. I'd met one of the girls before at Bath Spa and Chichester. One of the others normally goes to a military boarding school so it was really interesting to hear about that.

We all had to meet at the lecture theatre at 13:45 for a Q&A session. It was here I learnt of their very open take on teaching contemporary - something I'm still not sure on my opinion on. I feel like we need to know techniques but then again contemporary is kind of about exploring new things. They also talked about the class sizes - 25 approx in each, 50-60 overall.

Finally, we were taken for individual interviews that lasted about 10 minutes. I was asked about why DMU, what I had learnt from the class and about things I'd learnt from the class and about things I'd mentioned in my personal statement. When that was finished I could leave. I had expected to finish around 4pm so has my train home booked for 16:58 but it was only 14:30 so walked back to the station, found a nearby Costa, got a hot chocolate and wrote this. Hopefully my journey home will be smooth sailing. (Edit: it was very smooth - no problems and got back sooner than expected)

No updates today as London Studio Centre said their decision won't be out until approximately the end of the week - maybe later!