Lisa, founder and creator of ‘Ballet 4 You’, is a New Zealand born Western Australian who has been expertly trained in Classical Ballet, Jazz and Contemporary Dance.   She has taught these genres of dance for 34 years as owner and manager of studios in New Zealand, Western Australia and West Timor, Indonesia where she was an expat for several years.  

In West Timor where her husband Peter was working as a Marine Scientist, Lisa experienced the challenges that people face when living in remote communities, and subsequently this impacted on her vision of the needs of peoples who were isolated from resources that most of us in urban areas take for granted.  It was not surprising that there was no ballet studio and equally not surprising for anyone who knows Lisa, that she was soon taking ballet classes for the benefit of the expat children including her own two daughters, along with little Indonesian girls from the villages.  Lisa said that her ‘Bahasa Indonesia skills were pretty fundamental initially but there was nothing more motivating than being thrown in the deep end’.

On returning to Perth, Lisa completed her Bachelor of Arts Degree majoring in Asian Studies and International Relations (USQ 2000) and started a Master’s Degree in International Business through Curtin University, later completed with Distinction in 2006.  Meanwhile she had established her thriving ballet school Dancescene in 2002, and in 2004 she self-published her first children’s book ‘Andweina and Lucy Love to Dance’ (Niche Publishing) as a labour of love that was illustrated by Prue Van Wyck.  Both Lisa and Prue described themselves as ballet aficionados!

In 2007, in collaboration with Ken Chan of ‘The Media Agency’, they created the series of interactive DVDs ‘Teach Me to Dance’: ‘Ballet Basics Vols. 1 & 2’, ‘Jazz Basics Vol. 1’, ‘Adult Stretch’ and ‘Adult Ballet for Beginners Vol. 1’.   The DVDS were sold world-wide.   Lisa then toured the South West of Australia and donated the DVDs to libraries including in remote districts so that children in these communities could watch and learn to dance.  As a further philanthropic gesture, she then uploaded the content of the DVDs to the global audience on YouTube for those wishing to learn to dance, free of charge.

In 2008, Lisa’s mother was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s and so began her interest in the correlation between brain and body health, muscle strength and cognitive function and the fact that ballet exercises were constantly engaging the body and brain in a way that regular forms of exercise do not.  Ballet involves a lot of cross-lateral work, changes of alignment, tempo, the need to memorise steps and counts, musical interpretation, balance, positioning, posture and spatial awareness at all times.  

Lisa increased the number of Adult Ballet classes available in her studio and researched the positives of ballet exercises on the body and brain.  As an extension of this, she designed ‘Ballet 4 Seniors’ classes for women 60 yrs+ .  In parallel, from her experience teaching very young children with varying abilities, she formulated her own early dance education programme for younger students to incorporate skills for life, memory games and tricky sequencing so that in addition to learning ballet technique, children were learning skills that were readily transferrable into other areas of their overall development.

In 2017, Lisa launched the ‘Ballet 4 You’ programme and since then, she has been teaching privately in Perth, Western Australia.  2019 is the year Lisa is ready to take ‘Ballet 4 You’ – Ballet 4 Alzheimer’s to the world, online and at no cost to participants.