Artistic activities, be they the visual or performing arts, have been on our cultural agenda for quite some time. In the field of dance, in which I feel I am experienced enough to comment, a missing link exists.

Unfortunately, a good number of talented youngsters who had been offered opportunities to perform abroad were not ready to leave their comfortable family surroundings to pursue an artistic career abroad. Not because they had not been up to standard but mainly due to lack of experience in self-survival.

Every teacher of the different arts who do their part to encourage the arts in every way, and promote these outstanding pupils with the intention of them becoming good exponents of these selective arts, therefore also making a good name for Malta, are sometimes let down in spite of their unfailing encouragement. As a teacher I have come across would-be super dancers, who really only needed some guide lines and taught the dance jargon (French dance terms) by me as their teacher but, due to financial reasons, they could not pursue their dance career. Then there is another category that causes added concern: would-be dancers from better and more settled families, who pass the necessary auditions and obtain the necessary academic backing, find it hard to leave a very comfortable home once the novelty of living abroad and becoming self-sufficient starts digging in. The other and toughest set-up for an artist, is finding that the money earned from the performing or visual arts is not enough to make a decent living, so they would have to supplement their earnings with a part-time job as well.

So summing up the above factors, what we need here is to train talented artists, who would and should pursue a career abroad, and learn the skills of self-sufficiency from a very early age. These skills can only be encouraged by related guardians to help mould children into this changing culture, which we either follow or let go and ‘ miss the boat,’ like in the past.

Many qualified dance teachers and other educators are doing their utmost to bring out the best in our young people but this new youth culture, which is growing fast, needs great support of a new family perspective.

Pauleen Micallef

ST PAUL’S BAY