Hi there, looking for thoughts on how good the Dance program is at Elon, as compared to other colleges known for dance such as Pace, Arizona, Point Park, etc? Thanks for any information you can offer!
My Daughter is currently a freshman BFA Dance Major. The program and teachers are good, but it is not as intense
of a program as a conservatory/arts university such as Pace, Point Park, Marymount Manhattan, U Arts,Fordham, etc. and Arizona (although a traditional university) has an exceptional BFA program–but extremely intense and pre-professional. My daughter has friends at several of these schools and they take more training/dance classes a day, more rehearsals, and more dance shows/productions in the school year. I think "good’ is a relative term because it depends on what you are looking for out of a program …a concentration in ballet, tap, contemporary, modern, musical theater, etc. My daughter choose Elon because she wants to double-major in an academic subject while doing the BFA in dance and the other mentioned schools don’t have that as an option. She also wanted to have the "typical’ college campus experience and a smaller school. There are Elon alumni who are working dancers in dance companies, Rockettes, broadway,etc. I recommend that you go to all the school’s dance website pages and read their course requirements, what types of dance they focus on and how many performances they do a year. It depends on what you are looking for in a program and what kind of experiences you are looking for outside of dance.
I’m not a part of the dance program to know many details, but from what I’ve heard from my dancer friends, Elon’s dance program has a very strong emphasis on modern. My friends that had strictly trained in ballet prior to coming to Elon were very surprised.
Hi and thanks for your responses. Does anyone else have an opinion on Elon’s dance program vs. say, Chapman University, SMU, U Indiana Bloomington, Arizona, Pace, etc? Any updates or additional thoughts are welcomed! Thanks!
@oceanwalker Pace’s program is Commercial Dance so it really cannot be compared with the typical modern based BFA program.