Our Services
DancExcel Champion Center for Creative Arts Education is an aggressive program designed to enhance the educational process through an art-based curriculum. The mission of DancExcel is to provide each of its students with valuable strategies they need to achieve success in each of their future endeavors.
Leap & Learn
The Leap & Learn Curriculum is designed to introduce beginner dancers to fundamental movement skills while encouraging creativity and self-expression in a fun and educationally stimulating environment. It includes classes in ballet, tap, modern, African, and hip hop. We learn to dance, and we dance to learn!
Music Program
DancExcel’s music program offers young people an opportunity to work one on one with the most sought-after instructors in the NWI area. Our professional instructors are expert musicians, professional performers who are skilled in teaching their instruments. Music students train to master the fundamental theory and rudiments of their instruments, learning to read music as they play. Even our youngest students learn to play at a level of high-proficiency.
DX Academy
The Dx Academy is geared toward more experienced dance students who are looking to advance their performance and technical skills. Dx Academy students (8-21) are placed in beginner, intermediate, and advanced levels of ballet, tap, modern, hip hop, and African dance classes. Dx Academy students are often invited to perform in the performing ensemble that travels across the country representing DancExcel on stage, in festivals, and in other community events.
DX Summer Intensive
The Dx Summer Dance Intensive is an innovative program designed to help young dancers (ages 8*-18) learn to use creative expression to explore their own identities, hopes and dreams, while challenging them to enhance their current level of training.
Each summer, the program focuses on a different set dance and academic skills. Past summers have focused on developing choreographic and algebraic skills, enhancing creative communication and writing, dance physics, creativity in dance and film media, storytelling, and science.
Class Techniques
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This class teaches rhythm, coordination, musicality, and hip hop choreography. Students are challenged to think on their feet while enjoying an energetic and fast-paced class. Dancers develop focus, strength, and agility while having fun.
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Creative Movement develops motor skills and musicality to help young dancers prepare for formal technique classes. Dance activities are sensitive to young dancers’ physical, emotional, and cognitive development. Using dance elements of tempo, levels, and dynamics, they begin to explore their own creativity, self-expression, and fundamental movement skills.
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Ballet helps dancers create a firm dance foundation focused on physical discipline, general body awareness, and control. Dancers study both technique and terminology, develop core body strength, port de bras, and correct turn out based on anatomy and muscular development. All ballet classes stress correct placement (body alignment), and correct classical ballet technique. Class level is determined by the instructor, and is based on an individual assessment when the student takes a trial class. All students receive corrections during class to help them advance.
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The class utilizes a unique approach, blending techniques (Dunham, Horton, and Fagan) which are integrated to build strength and flexibility. Horton technique emphasizes a whole body, anatomical approach to dance that enables unrestricted, dramatic freedom of expression. Afro-Caribbean technique created by Katherine Dunham fuses the polyrhythmic dance styles of Caribbean and African cultures with European-style ballet. Fagan technique also draws on elements of ballet, modern, and Afro-Caribbean styles in a way that is designed to build physical and mental strength in dancers.