Dancers visit to Whitworth students inspires future careers

Pendleton Sixth Form College dancers at Whitworth High School

A visit by dancers from Pendleton Sixth Form College in Salford inspired a Whitworth student to look at applying to the college next year.

Jasmine Clayton has been dancing for 11 years, since she first stepped into Dansworks Dance Academy of Performing Arts.

Jasmine, 15, is a student at Whitworth Community High School where the dancers from the Centre of Excellence for Performing and Production Arts held workshops.

She said: “We did commercial contemporary dance and it is always cool to see how different people work and their different choreography.

“Pendleton has now been put on my list of different places that I want to look at auditioning for.

“Dance is what I have been doing my entire life, but it is only in the last couple of years that it has become a more serious thing and I have thought to myself, ‘I could actually do that’.

“I don’t know what I would do without music and dance in my life. When I am dancing, I can get frustrated if I feel I don’t get it, but when I perform a dance and it goes well and I put in the right emotions and expressions I just get this rush of adrenaline and it is really fun.

“The best thing is being on stage in front of an audience - it is really exciting.”

The dancers also got the Whitworth students to perform a lyrical style of dance, so they had to show the emotion of the music in their performance.

Laura McGarry-Clayton, 14, has been dancing with Samba Fitness and Dance since she was three.

She said: “I loved it. I like doing that style and as I no longer learn it now it was nice to get back to it.”