Kirsty's BAPP Blog

It is the time of year when we all have our annual meetings with the director to see whether or not our contracts are being renewed for next season and whether or not we will be receiving a promotion. Having been out for most of the season after my hip surgery I was quite honestly expecting to be let go but was both shocked and overjoyed to hear that my contract has been renewed and I am able to continue working with my current company for the 21/22 season. Naturally as the industry goes others weren't quite so lucky as me and had their contracts terminated. Today we had class with one of my all time favourite teachers; she is one of the most inspirational women I have ever met and as a teacher not only pushes you to be the best dancer you can be but also helps drive your motivation and desire to succeed in a positive way.  Knowing that we had all had our meetings over the past few days and that people had mixed emotions about the news they received she took the time to talk to us

About a week and a half ago I thought I had finally decided what I want the focus of my inquiry topic to be; Overuse injuries as a result of overtraining in classical ballet dancers. Having spoken to Helen in my 1-2-1 she thinks this could be a good line of inquiry to take however the main question she posed to me was what are my actual questions within this topic and if I'm honest I have no idea. I perceive from my own experiences and from the experiences of friends I have within the industry that not only are overuse injuries common in classical ballet, they are also often caused by overtraining and rigorous schedules but I don't really know how to turn this perception into a research question. My original plan was to research into common overuse injuries and the root of the taxing schedules dancers are often presented with within the professional ballet world and try to find correlations between the two although this isn't really a question but more of an exploration. Ha

I had a 1-2-1 with Helen a few days ago and although some of what we spoke about was very specific to my topic I feel like a lot of what we spoke about could be useful to others who feel a bit lost on this journey through module 2!  First off the literature review. This has been giving myself and a lot of the people that I've spoken to an unnecessary amount of stress and I feel somewhat more relaxed after speaking to Helen about this. The key points I took away regarding the literature review are that it can be structured in any way you want as long as the required content is there. The required content should include an overview of   research methods, designs for research proposals and ethics of planning a proposal and give a broad overview of your inquiry topic and the themes which it branches out to . The introduction should be short and basically state that your inquiry spans x topics and that although only a few (3-4) key texts are discussed in this review many people have sp