Adventures in Pre-School Dance takes popular nursery rhymes and classical melodies and transforms them structurally and stylistically into fun, funky music appropriate for pre-school dance class. Each volume contains two complete self-contained classes - over an hour of enchanting, evocative music for practice, improvisation and performance - along with a selection of exercises specially devised to develop creativity, listening skills, imagination and musicality in young dancers.

The series was created with the help of four dance teachers with a wide experience of teaching RAD ballet and ISTD modern and tap. The team was keen to make the music useful not just to qualified dance teachers but also to non-specialist teachers who want to explore dance in the classroom or the gym.

Each CD comes with a list of suggested exercises for each piece of music - Arriving at the Ball for instance might be used for elegant walks, knee bends or tiptoe runs, and Walking like a Robot might be used for marches, jumps, robot arms or isolations. As well as tracks intended to develop specific skills (skipping or galloping for instance), each CD contains four interpretive movement pieces for creative improvisation on an around the world theme. And finally, there’s a series of games to introduce children to a range of musical concepts such as tempo, pitch and timbre.

The series was arranged and produced by Andrew Holdsworth, who has worked in London as a producer, arranger and composer in the dance world since the turn of the century.

He played for his first ballet and tap classes at the age of eleven and has worked with many inspired and inspiring teachers over the years. With Jonathan Still, Andrew produced all the music for the Royal Academy of Dance syllabi, including Pre-Primary and Primary, Grades 1 to 5 and all the vocational grades, as well as the Studio Series and After Class CDs. He created his own Reimagined for Ballet Class series in 2014, which takes well-known pop and classical themes and transforms them into pieces with styles and structures appropriate for ballet class.

Outside of the dance studio, Andrew has produced, engineered and played on albums for artists of many genres, from death metal (Paradise Lost, Napalm Death) to Irish folk (Mary Black, Finbar Furey), from pop (Primal Scream, One Direction) to classical ensembles and instrumentalists (Cherry Mint Koala, Tony Woollard).

Other instrumentalists on the Adventures volumes include the cellist Tony Woollard. Tony also features on many tracks in the RAD syllabus, such as the grade 3 port de bras and the grade 5 pliés. You can watch Tony and Andrew recording Bach’s Air on a G string here...

and Valse Triste by Sibelius…

Charlie Brown plays the violin for several of the pre-school pieces. You can see him performing with Cherry Mint Koala here…

Singers from Hurst Lodge School in Ascot also feature on the ‘Adventures’ recordings, along with Chloe East and Jess Nimmo.

Adventures in Pre-School Dance Volumes 1 & 2 are available for download as single tracks or as complete albums from Amazon, iTunes and most other online retailers. Here are the direct iTunes links:

Adventures in Pre-School Dance Volume 1

Adventures in Pre-School Dance Volume 2

CDs may be ordered from this website. Postage is free within the United Kingdom. All major credit cards accepted.

If you have any questions about your order, please get in touch using the form below, or contact us on (+44) 7973 348813