Education & Classes in Victoria

Since 1974, the Victoria College of Art has minted more than 5,000 fine-arts diplomas for its alumni, making it the largest independent art school on Vancouver Island. The faculty's expertise extends into a panoramic array of artistic disciplines, including painting, design and installation, photography, and art history. The college offers a number of certificates in addition to its fine-arts diploma, including fine-arts-related-occupation certificates in textiles, mould-making, and certificate-painting. Pint-sized Picassos take their first brushstrokes in summer camp classes, which draw on kid-friendly themes such as fairy tales, time travel, and mask-making.

Teaching hips to swivel to new circumferences, dance instructors impart their masterful moves unto students in the respected tradition Arthur Murray schools have upheld since 1912. Students can bring a partner to their lessons or fly solo and dance with the instructor. Protégés may find their new moves applicable in a number of settings, such as when prepping for a wedding dance or when blending into an airport crowd that breaks out in the cha-cha. Embodying the three-count time of a stately waltz brings partners in close, and rumba moves or swing steps add vibrancy and playfulness to one’s repertoire.

The Victoria studio provides a warm, aesthetically sound environment for engaging in private and group dance lessons. The array of dance styles is well suited to teaching feet to slice and dice a rug until it is no longer recognizable.

The roll call of instructors at Passion and Performance Studio sounds like the lineup of a variety show. Professional circus performers and cruise-ship dancers work to get adults to shimmy and pirouette with flair across the 900-square-foot studio. The classes are split into two main categories, passion and performance, so all students can feel comfortable obliterating calories in the communal environment. The popular Sweat and Strut class, for example, incorporates a new move each week to work the arms, legs, and abs.

Victoria Academy of Dramatic Arts’ 11 instructors share more than two centuries of combined experience in the entertainment industry, heading up a yearlong, by-audition acting program designed specifically for television, film, and commercial work. Not everybody is ready to make the plunge into the screen, so the school also runs smaller-scale workshops appropriate for all experience levels that cover casting dos and don’ts, career guidance, and summoning the willpower to meet James Cameron’s third eye. The Actor’s Makeover course tightens audition material into 15 minutes of pure emotional power, and part-time intro classes accommodate day jobs.