How does it say in Ferri Georg Feil's highly funny children's song "The Trumpet Pig", in which the mother animal turns to her little piglet: "Hey, you're going to be an artist, darling / Famous and rich and beautiful / The best way to learn the violin / There the piglet squeaks “No!” / When I learn an instrument / It has to be the trumpet!” Exactly, that's how it works, you can't talk a child into wanting to be an artist, or at least not down to the last detail.
And again, among the artistic career aspirations that parents may have for their children, the profession of dancer certainly does not rank very high.
How do you come up with him?
Music is all around us, violins in the supermarket, trumpets in the airport, but where do you see dancing outside of the theatre?
Maybe on Tiktok what everyone is watching
Dancing is not only the most problematic of the artistic professions – from a parent's point of view anyway – because it is the worst paid.
Above all, the career is over between thirty and forty years.
This also applies to footballers, but they are already paid better in the second Bundesliga than dancers at municipal theaters.
After the increase in the minimum fees that has just taken place, with the "normal contract stage" you will now get just 2,915 euros gross from next year instead of the previous 2,000 euros gross.
But what can you recommend to parents whose children still want to be dancers?
What if the talent is there, but the family thinks that school education shouldn't end before the Abitur is passed?
Then maybe Germany's only dance school would be the school of choice.
In Essen-Werden, Felicitas Schönau directs the institution, whose light-flooded ballet halls are housed in the renovated former train station building.
1200 students attend the school, about ten percent of them choose pre-professional dance training.
In Level 5, children start with eight hours of dance classes in addition to the general classes they receive in the afternoons.
That increases to eighteen hours of instruction in the upper grades.
Thanks to a special ministerial permit, high school students can choose dance as their second advanced course and also take their Abitur in this subject.
Very few children who choose this training course become professional dancers, although some have the choice of five fabulous ballet schools after high school, which offer them places to complete their professional training.
But as with the sports high school, there are also different options at the dance high school after the Abitur.
But even without later choosing a profession in the field of dance, for example as a teacher, choreographer or dramaturge, the children and young people benefit personally from the training: their attitude, their musicality, their dexterity, their self-confidence, their ability to work in a team, their understanding of art, their freedom in the emotional expression, all this and much more develops fantastically.
This could now be observed again at the school dance evening,
So many strong personalities made the stage in the new auditorium of the Folkwang University seem small.
Martin Chaix is responsible for the staging and most of the enchanting choreographies between solo, pas de deux and group dance, sometimes on point, sometimes in slippers, which are appropriate to the ability.
With his gentle, neo-classical style to extraordinarily demanding music by artists ranging from Johann Sebastian Bach to Olivier Messiaen and Luciano Berio to Meredith Monk, the former dancer of the "Ballett am Rhein" has ensured that all young dancers can show their skills with confidence and naturalness.
The dance evening was sold out three times, and the auditorium was by far not only filled with the enthusiastic families of the students, as director Fee Schönau proudly emphasizes.
Violin or trumpet is not the question here,