This past Tuesday, I took the Department of Dance’s comprehensive exam to qualify for high honors in my dance BFA major. (Ugh, the honors system is kind of confusing, is never fully articulated, and — for Latin honors — makes me really mad. Let’s not go there.) With a handful of other brave souls, I sat down to four hours and thirty-one pages of a test on all the required classes for the BFA major.
Required classes include:
- Ballet Technique
- Pointe
- Modern Technique
- Jazz Technique
- Body Placement
- Masterworks of Dance
- Music Theory for Dance
- Choreography 1
- Choreography 2
- Improvisation
- Spanish Character
- Slavic Character
- Butler Ballet
- Teaching Analysis of Classical Technique 1 & 2 (2 may be substituted for a different Teaching Analysis class)
- Dance History 1 & 2
All the above had sections on the test. I was writing for the full four hours.
It wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be, actually. I know I messed up a few sections — for example, I totally had “B flat” as the answer to a key signature question, but I erased it and put “B minor.” Circle of fifths, you deceived me!
The section on Butler Ballet was last, and I (as well as many of the others) got rather nostalgic answering those questions. It was good to review everything I’ve learned over the past four years; studying for and taking the test brought all the pieces together, gave me a real sense of the breath and depth of what I’ve learned in my major.
Sentimentality.
And I finally saw Trip!
