We offer 45 individual Youth Performance Classes (YPC), which run 36 weeks per year between September and June. We aim to provide an outlet to explore creativity, evoke positivity and build confidence for students ages 3 to 18 years old. All our classes are taught by industry leading educators with professional stage experience, pedagogical training / certification and years of experience in their respective fields. Events and performance opportunities for our YPC students include our Winter Musical and Annual Recital.

Classes: Preschool & Kindergarten / Acro / Ballet / Contemporary / Hip Hop / Jazz / Tap / Musical Theatre / Vocal

Preschool + Kindergarten

Classes for students aged 3-5 years old are primarily held on Saturday mornings with additional options on Mondays, Tuesdays and Wednesdays. We offer Preschool students a creative movement based Ballet class filled with fruitful imagery, physical exploration and rhythmic play as well as a Tumblers class, which incorporates age appropriate skills used in future gymnastics and acrobatics training. Our Kindergarten programming includes: Intro to Musical Theatre (Singing, Dancing and Acting), Ballet, Tumblers: Intro to Acrobatics, Jazz + Tap combination classes and Kids Bop: Intro to Hip Hop.

Acro

Acro is a highly disciplined art form that combines power, mobility and coordination. It is an artistic and physical practice of dance and gymnastics focusing on limbering and tumbling as well as flexibility, inversions and partnering. TRAC faculty follow a specific set of progressive skills to ensure safety, creating confident and capable movers who captivate audiences with their athletic feats. We offer Acro recreational and advanced classes on Thursdays for students grade 1 - 12. Intro to Acro is offered on Mondays for Preschool and Kindergarten students.

Ballet

Ballet focuses on strong foundational skills that ensure a true sense of accomplishment in five class stages: warm up, at the barre, in the centre, across the floor and performance. We help students set and achieve artistic and skill based goals through an open curriculum that allows us to create classes specifically for the individuals in the room. All classes work on alignment, musicality, performance qualities and sophistication as well as jumping and turning. We offer Ballet classes 5 days a week with Youth Performance Classes on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Saturdays.

Contemporary

The term “Contemporary” in dance encompasses many viewpoints and ideas in motion. TRAC’s goal is to teach each student how to understand and explore movement through their entire body with classes that combine set material and improvisation. Each year students develop a greater understanding of dynamics, momentum, weight transfer, isolation, actions of the spine, spacial relationships, rhythm or pulse, contraction + release, floor-work, all while following the current trends. Contemporary classes for YPC students are offered Tuesdays and Wednesdays.

Hip Hop

Hip Hop (also spelled hip-hop) is a culture and art movement created by Black and Brown Americans in the Bronx in the 1970s. Hip Hop is made of 4 elements: DJing, MCing, Breaking and Graffiti. It is an outlet that builds hope, energy, community, and excitement. Rocking, Popping, Locking, Breaking, Waacking as well as freestyle movement all come from a larger culture to be recognized and taught in order to build understanding between peoples and honour or exchange ideas over time. Tuesday and Saturday Hip Hop classes at TRAC give students the opportunity to develop their own sense of style, to feel music and to sweat! For our Kindergarten students we also run Kids Bop, an introduction to Hip Hop, on Saturday mornings.

Jazz

Jazz evolves with the times to keep current with popular culture. Throughout its history, the jazz vocabulary and style varied between regions of America and beyond. TRAC curriculum currently balances technical skill, musicality, isolations and syncopations, grounded movement and varying qualities or efforts used to create dynamic performance. At the moment, Jazz can be broken down into three streams: 1 - Vernacular or Rooted Jazz, 2 - Theatrical Jazz and 3 - Commercial Jazz. We focus mainly on Commercial Jazz during classes on Tuesdays and Saturdays while Theatrical Jazz is interwoven into every Musical Theatre class we offer.

Tap

Tap is the meeting place between music and movement. It is a percussive, intricate style of dance that stimulates the brain as much as the feet. Like Jazz, there are many styles of Tap including: Rhythmic, Broadway, Modern and Hoofing. Tap teaches cultural practices and group dynamics through call and response learning, complex coordination and shared timing that can be picked up and fine tuned over years of group practice. Tap classes are offered on Saturdays often in combination with Jazz.

Musical Theatre + Film & TV

Musical Theatre + Film & TV is a combination class held on Wednesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays for students interested in building triple threat skills in singing, acting and dancing. It is an ensemble program that brings various ages and levels together to create lively energy in the classroom and on stage. The program is broken into: Technical Skills, Live Performance, and Film & TV.  Students will have the opportunity to perform in two live shows. Students Grade 7 and up will also work on script writing, stage craft and production skills while developing original content for our annual recitals.

Vocal, Acting, Song Writing

Acting, Vocal Melodies and Private lessons, held on Thursdays, give students the chance to learn songs and repertoire created by Broadway and Film + TV legends as well as music and/or scene work made specifically for each age group. These classes go hand-in-hand with the overall Musical Theatre + Film & TV program performing at the Winter Musical and June Recital. We also offer private classes in Jazz Vocals, Musical Theatre Voice Training and Song Writing with chances to perform at the Toronto and Provincial Level Kiwanis Festivals and our RAA Company Showcase. Congrats Sophie Teixeira on representing Toronto at Provincial level competitions three years in a row!

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The Railpath Arts Centre is set on providing 21st century education with deeper enrichment, researched training methods and anatomically sound movement modules. YPC + RAA curriculum will include lesson plans from “Roots, Rhythm, Race & Dance” created by Karida Griffith to better connect our current activities with historical accuracy and overall cultural awareness. We will engage in story telling that helps students understand our collective history as well as share online dance content to create clear, visual relationships between dance forms that meet students / clients where they are at in terms of age and maturity.