Why I teach
A few notes on what led me from the stage to teaching, and on what I try to pass on in class.
The first classroom of my life was my mother’s. Before she was my first teacher, she was already the teacher of dozens of children. I would sit against the wall and watch the line of students at the barre. That is where I understood that this profession is a transmission: you receive, then you give back.
At home we used to say: “if you miss class, you are stealing from yourself.” I heard it through my whole childhood. I say it to my students today, more gently perhaps, but I mean it the same way. Dance does not ask for talent first. It asks you to come back, every week, and to pay attention.
The stage gave me a great deal: roles, partners, teachers, ten years with Les Ballets de Monte-Carlo. When that life ended, the question was never whether I would teach. It was where, and for whom. The answer was in front of me: Monaco, where I had danced all those years, and its children, to whom I wanted to offer a classical ballet school close to home.
I do not only teach steps. I try to give what dance gave me: posture, musicality, attention to others. In a class you learn to work in a group, to wait your turn, to begin again without losing heart. These things serve a whole life, whether you become a dancer or not.
It is not really a business. It is a vocation: I know how to do this, and I believe that if I do not do it, nobody will do it in this way. So every week, at the studio, we begin again: the barre, the music, the corrections.
Let’s dance through this life.