Huge congratulations to past Excel student – Katie Franklin who has recently graduated from De Montfort University with a first class honours degree in ‘Dance!’

We are so proud of Katie who began her dance journey at Excel Performing Arts when she was just nine years old taking classes in ballet, tap, street jazz, drama and performance. It was clear when she was at Excel how much passion she had for dance and she finally left in 2019 at eighteen years old to go and study further at university.

At university Katie trained in Contemporary dance, Improvisation, Ballet, Hip Hop and African principles. She is currently part of a company called ‘Code Crew’ which is a national and international winning Hip Hop dance group. Katie is also a dance artist in a new contemporary, breaking fused dance company named ‘Company Apidae’ who has recently performed their work ‘Unconditional’ for the Breakin’ Convention under the project ‘Emerge + See’ at Birmingham Hippodrome Theatre. Katie has also performed with Company ‘Apidae’ the debut of ‘Unconditional’ at the Curve Theatre in Leicester.

With an interest in displaying dance on screen and having created a few of her own screen dance works, Katie is continuing her exploration with the fusion of film and dance.

Katie is currently building her portfolio to apply for auditions to perform on cruises and for Contemporary dance companies. In the meantime watch this space as Katie is joining our teaching team as a cover teacher. We are also very keen for Katie to teach some exciting Contemporary dance workshops at Excel. Having formed her own approaches to dance, Katie wants to go into teaching this and sharing with students her dance experiences, ability and relationship towards contemporary dance. We are currently putting together an interest list for this so please let us know if you would like a place and then we can decide where we can fit it in our timetable.