Monika (58) – I Have Loved Ballet since I Was a Child

Since I was a little girl I have loved ballet. Even my mother loved it since she was a child. But there was no chance to take classes in times of WW II. When she felt me moving in her belly, still then very actively, she decided, if the baby was a girl she should learn classic dance. And so it was. In my family everyone discussed physical training and sports.

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Warming up before class: Monika (right).

Ballet means a lot to me. It is a very important part of my life. Since many decades I have been working as a dance teacher and I cannot imagine a more interesting profession. Training with Karl Reinisch has been a big progression in my classic dance life and in relation to everything I had ever done before. When I started training in his ballet school I still had attended other ballet schools. I love the challenge there – you become fitter, you train with music and very methodically which helps me a lot when I am teaching.

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It doesn´t matter with whom I am training – with grownups, with advanced pupils or with children and teenagers. I trained with little girls when there was no place/space left in the grownup course. It means total bliss when I am training. Even if I sometimes call ballet “military for girls”. The older I become the more discontent am I as I realize that the mind´s and body´s capabilities decline.

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For different reasons I attend ballet performances at the opera very seldom. I think they are not worth the entrance fee. As long as I can dance I postpone watching. Since many years I have been teaching only grownups in yoga, round- and square-dance and I do “Dancing with People in the Middle Years of their Lives”. With this course I want to communicate the wonderful feeling of the dancing body and the flexibility of the joints, everything geared towards body and mind. There are more and more people who love this and I am very happy about. So I can enable my students to feel what I feel when dancing.

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Monika Meister is President of UNITED DANCERS http://uniteddancers.at/. You can find more about what she is doing and teaching on her beautiful web http://bewegungsschule.at/

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