Talented in Dance: The Bloom Stage Model revisited in the personal histories of dance students

Bloom (1985) reported on the careers of a sample of 120 talented individuals from three domains: science, athletics and the arts. His findings are used as a starting point for the research on professional dance students presented in this article. Three issues were studied: the relevance of significant others in a dance career; the issue of detecting dance talent and, also, using Bloom's proposed three career stages in a talent domain, how teachers are described by students, and what the characteristics of a typical dance class are. A questionnaire was constructed and administered to 129 students in the Dance Department at the Amsterdam School of the Arts, the Netherlands. The results indicate that, in addition to the dance teacher and parents (as highlighted in Bloom's study), peers should also be considered. Furthermore, the majority of students have been labelled "talented" at some point in their career, notably by teachers and other dance experts, while in fact parents played no role here. A new measurement format was introduced in an attempt to reveal the peculiarities of teacher and dance class during the three career stages. The results obtained correspond to Bloom's findings. Therefore, the present study not only supports Bloom's findings in a dance sample, but also offers a generalisation from Bloom's male-dominated sample to a female-dominated one.