adancemamma

HelloMy 8 year old daughter is a is a dancer. She loves what she dose and has been dancing from the age of 2 ½. Her first performance was to Animals crackers in my soup to dancing on the Carnival cruise line in July 2007. She trains 2 hours everyday Tap, Ballet, Jazz, Lyrical, Team and technique; she truly gives it her all.Currently, the older she gets the more it costs, and I can’t afford over 550.00 a month not including performance, solo , costume, and deposit fees shoes ect…… . I’m a single mom trying to make this work. She struggles with Dyslexia daily, and I want her to enjoy 1 activity in her life she doesn’t have to fight. I won’t pull her from dance she lights up for dance and it’s the only thing that gets her out of bed in the morning. My question is: Are there any companies who would be willing to sponsor my daughter, or donate money (25.00 to a million dollars) to her dance account in exchange for advertising? A dance momma

suzanneg

I believe that's done on a local, even neighborhood, level. Your local butcher, tailer, dry cleaner, etc.

janine_rs

It's really great that your daughter loves dancing so much and I certainly hope that you'd never have to consider pulling her out of it against her wishes. But I'd like to offer a different perspective for you to consider.As the mother of a highly trained daughter who is finishing up her last year of a BFA dance program at one of the top performance-based college dance programs in the U.S. and already auditioning for dance companies, I think your daughter is doing too much, too soon. I ascribe to the "old school" that says that jazz dance shouldn't be offered to kids under 10 years old. I believe this country is sexualizing girls at far too young an age and recent articles concerning what parents let their young daughters wear for Halloween supports this view.The industry that has grown around the concept of dance competitions has become a big business that is, in most cases, actually at odds with producing classically trained dancers who possess top-notch technical skills. That is because rehearsing for competitions and shows actually takes away from time spent on mastering technique. And the younger a student tries to pull off the fancy tricks that form the centerpiece of competition routines, the less chance they have of ever establishing a strong technical base because it gets harder and harder to unlearn the poor technique that produced fast results. Just as kiddy beauty pageants will not prepare 8 year olds to become adult singers and actors, so will kiddy dance competitions not prepare them to become professional dancers. If dance students establish a strong technical base as beginners and continue taking dance technique classes for at least 10 hours a week when they are about 12 years old, then adding a competition dance team on top of that is fine.My daughter started ballet at 3, tap at 5 and jazz at 10 - the youngest ages that her studio allowed. So when she was 8, she was only taking about 3 hours a week of dance. But her solid training prepared her well. She was later accepted to some of the top summer dance intensives in the country. Those were certainly very expensive - around $3,000. And now she's at a top college dance program that is also a lot of money. So it's a good thing that I wasn't shelling out the kind of money that you're doing right now when she was little.My advice is to not get caught up in this money machine that feeds off of parents who get vicarious stars in their eyes from seeing their kids dazzle on a dance floor. As a single mother with a daughter who has dyslexia, you have much better things to spend your money on than solos and costumes.