Dancer of the Month June

Nicolette Miller

Angharad, Sophie and Jade Edge

We all love dancing and it is a BIG part of our lives. Not only do we all come to Mrs Pughe and Lizzie, we also do Irish Dancing with Marion and Roisin Turley. It is always difficult balancing the 2 and sometimes we do both on the same night. They are quite different, with ballet and tap we do exams and then we love doing the troupes for festivals and shows. With Irish it is all about competing to work your way up through the levels and eventually the ultimate goal is to qualify to compete at the World Championships. With ballet and tap the troupes take a lot of work for many weeks, but with Irish we quite often do cabaret with just a small amount of practice as we already know most of the steps. In Irish it is knees in, in ballet it is knees out, but as we love both we don’t want to give either up.

Jade – I am 9 years old. I have been dancing since the age of 6. I do ballet with Mrs Pughe and Irish dancing too. At the moment I am working on my Grade 2. In Irish I am in the primary and intermediate levels.

I go to St. John Fisher Catholic school where I am in year 5. As well as my dancing I like to run cross country at school and I go swimming once or twice a week. I am also learning to play the guitar and I sing in the school choir. This is a picture of me with my friend at a fancy dress party.

Sophie – I am 13 years old. I have been dancing since the age of 2 when mum couldn’t keep me out of the class that Angharad was doing. My first ever troupe with Mrs Pughe was the teddy bear’s picnic. Mum had been ill in bed for 6 weeks so dad had to arrange the costume and everything under mum’s supervision. When they saw it they laughed so much and after that we were completely hooked.

I do ballet, tap, jazz and singing. I did give tap up at first because it was too noisy!, but it wasn’t long before I started again. I also gave up ballet for 18 months as I didn’t like doing the exams, but again I came back. I don’t get to as many lessons as I should do so I have not been able to do all my exams. Mrs Pughe and Lizzie are very patient with me and understand that I do so many things I often have clashes.

As well as dancing I love sport of all sorts. At my school, Cardinal Wiseman, I play netball, football, hockey and anything else going. I swim with Coventry and try to train at least 3 times every week. I have swum in every Diddy League from the age of 9 to 12 and am now swimming in the Speedo League. I like travelling to all the different places on the coach with my friends, though sometimes my parents come to watch and support us too. I also do cross country running with Sphinx club. This is great fun I have meet loads of new friends through this. But it’s extremely muddy at times!

Me at Ponds Forge

Me and Elise before a race.

I love all sorts of performing and have been in 2 pantomimes, 1 at The Butts which Jade and Angharad were also in, and last year I was in Jack and The Beanstalk at The Belgrade. Both of them were wonderful experiences, and I made loads of friends.

Emily, Tara and me in my first panto.

The flower fairies in Jack And The Beanstalk.

I also auditioned to be in the Planet Cook programmes on television and ended up filming 5 episodes which were great fun – though I don’t think mum and dad enjoyed getting up at 5 am to take me to the Pinewood studios. I also met some famous actors and presenters, they were all really lovely. Here is picture of me with Mo when we filmed a trailer for the BBC

I love going shopping, meeting up with all my mates and having a wicked social life. My best mate ever is Claire who has been at school with me since I was 4 and also does Irish dancing. She is in the picture with me to the left. On the right is me with Melissa and Aisling before we danced at a Bob Brolly charity concert. The best ever experience was when we went to Ireland to dance in a ceilidh team, 8 of us did an 8 hand reel at the World Championships. We didn’t do that well but it was so much fun, especially dancing in the pub where we were staying and everyone joined in.

Angharad – I am 15 years old and have been dancing as long as I can remember. In the past I have done lots of other sports like netball and swimming, running, qymnastics and water-polo but now I tend to concentrate on my dancing

Me with friends at a ballet class.

I do ballet, tap, modern, singing and Irish, and I am also doing dance GCSE at school.This has just given me the opportunity to do a 5 day dance workshop ending in 1 day of filming to make a dance film about ribbon making for the Herbert Art Gallery

Me and some friends ready to go out on my birthday

When I was 10 I danced and sang at the Symphony hall in Birmingham with Eleanor raising money for Diabetes with a company called Let’s Sing. Others in the show were Ronnie Corbett and John Sargeant. When I was a bit older in 2003 I danced in the Three Spires pantomime performing Snow White. During this I made lots of new friends and had tons of fun.

Other than dancing, during my spare time I like to shop, spend time with my friends and ice skate which generally means spending Friday nights down at the ice rink in Coventry, (but obviously after I have been to ballet class that night). Another favourite is having pampering hot tub parties with my friends.

Me and Katie at the Great Britain Championships

Me and Katie at the Great Britain

While I have been at Allesley I have been in 4 shows and many festivals. I have also been on two trips to London to concourse which was not only hard work but a great experience including a real laugh at the same time. I am currently competing at the top level of Irish dancing which is open. It’s always a real challenge to keep my place in the age group and to improve at the same time. I am very keen on my music aswell and recently went to see Christina in concert in Birmingham. It was sooooooo good

Me and Hadley on holiday

I am always really busy and it’s nice to get a break when we go on holiday. In 06 we went to La Rochelle in France and the year before to Kalkan in Turkey. Above are 2 pictures of me with friends on my holiday in France.

The Irish crew singing.

Our grandparents and great grandma live in Devon, and one of our favourite activities is to go crabbing when we visit them. If you look carefully you can see we  have just caught a crab. We always let them all back in, and they get a good feed of bacon or their favourite is squid.

When we go to Devon we also go letterboxing on Dartmoor. There are hundreds of little boxes hidden all over the moor and you have to follow clues and have good eyesight to find them. We leave our own boxes there sometimes too and go and collect them another time, everyone leaves messages and their own stamps in the boxes so it is really interesting.

We love our family holidays and always try to go somewhere interesting. Last year we went to a place called Ronce-les-Bains, in France. It is a brilliant place to go if you love oysters (we did try them when the man in the caravan next door cooked too many). We usually manage to find something active to do – though we love to chill too. In France we hired bikes, but it wasn’t as hard as Holland where we cycled about 30 miles every day carrying all our luggage

The year before we went to Turkey and visited June’s wonderful house in Kalkan. We were only there for a week but we really didn’t want to come home. There we managed to find a canoe trip and plenty of swimming, as well as plenty of relaxation

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