Alice's Stride Placement

Hello, I am Alice Wise and I am from Solihull.
I am currently taking part with something set up by Youth Dance England called Stride. At the moment I am doing part of my placement with Dancescape helping them with the showcase Bounce!09 which is coming up on the 10th November at the Solihull Arts Complex. I got into Stride through the dance company Solihull Youth Dance Company which is run by Sita Manghnani which I was lucky to be accepted for when I auditioned last year. 8 people were short listed from SYDC and then 4 of us, myself, Demi Cooper, Faye Hadley and Shivani Palmer made it through to the actual Stride project. On that project we had to attend a residential either in London or Manchester and took part in many practical and theory sessions to do with dance all over the country. From that each person got given a mentor and they had to sort out a placement. My mentors are Hayley Duffield and Sarah Jassal and you have to do a 14 week placement. I am starting my placement today and have been doing press releases and programmes for the showcase. I found out about Stride from SYDC where we had to send in a video of us dancing, we used our amazing show piece from SYDC as our audition piece which was choreographed by Sita.
Currently at SYDC, Sita has been on maternity leave so we have had Ria Newman take over for the last couple of months. With Ria we worked on a piece which we will hopefully be performing soon. Sita is now back after having a gorgeous baby boy, Jayan and held the audition for SYDC which 35 people attended and 11 people successfully made it into the company.
I hope to continue with Solihull Youth Dance Company and with my Stride placement as they are both great opportunities :).