Presidio Dance Theatre

My daughter had 2 years of formal pre-​ballet training with San Francisco Ballet prior to coming here. SFB had an audition when those 2 years were over, and my daughter was not chosen for the San Francisco Ballet school. They mentioned she did not have a natural «turn-​out», which is required of a child to be chosen for the prestigious SFB school.
Ok fine, my daughter still wanted to dance.
We came to meet the artistic director, Sherene Melania. I explained to her about our experience with SFB, and she said that school is boring because they do the same moves the whole time. I should have seen this as the first red flag because everyone knows that is how great dancers are born, by repetition. Yes, it may be boring but at least SFB dancers are doing it correctly because they practice the same moves over and over until they get it right.
I must mention that I was looking for a classical ballet instruction for my daughter, and not frou-​frou dance instruction, like you will find here. We were told the show will be at the Palace of Fine Arts.
We took a chance on enrolling her anyway, into the pre-​company classes with PDT. She went to lessons 2x a week. When I gave the owner Judy my credit card, I was overcharged. I’m afraid if I hadn’t noticed the over $ 450 over-​charge, nobody would have said a thing. That’s criminal. Finally I noticed the over-​charge on my credit card statement. I immediately told Judy about this, and she told me it’s because I was charged for 3 days per week, instead of 2. She mentioned something was wrong with their system. Uh yeah, something is certainly wrong with your system if you’re charging more than the agreed upon amount and then trying to hide it until I bring it up. This is immoral, dishonest, and irresponsible. Then it took over a month for Judy to credit back my card. Because of their «mistake» I was the one who had to pay my credit card company the extra interest charges. What’s wrong with this picture you ask? Well, stay-​tuned because there’s more dishonesty coming right up.
During this initial experience with the overcharge mistake, the entire time I couldn’t get a straight answer out of anybody. Judy kept referring me to another Mom who worked in her office, this Mom seemed completely disjointed and definitely did not seem to have any interest in the business, except for the fact that her daughter was in the school. She was simply helping Judy out with some tasks so her daughter could get a discount.
Finally, my refund came but it was too late, like I said, it took these brainiacs over a month to process my refund and I ended up with interest charges, which I paid.
Now going back to instruction, on Mon the class was supposed to be ballet & on Wed it was folk dance. I bought my daughter a set of folk dance shoes. Sherene was absent for at least half of the classes and the girls and 1 boy in my daughters class spent a great deal of time just sitting on the floor. The students were not instructed well at all times, one example is that they were expected to do their stretches on their own, as if they were seasoned professionals. I observed many of these classes, and could tell that many of the younger girls 8 – 10 years old had no idea which stretches they were supposed to be doing. A lot of the time they just ended up playing around with each other and chit chatting. Now onto the show. The Holiday 2014 show took place at the dance studio.
They had 2 shows, each was $ 80 per person & included a couple tiny dried up tea sandwiches & treats in a box, and tea.
Dancers still had to pay $ 40 for their box.
They insisted my daughter perform both nights even though we weren’t about to pay twice for a mediocre performance and tasteless food. Ok fine, the fact that she was required to perform twice was fine.
However the performance was less than amazing and the food was embarrassing. Both were not worth the $ 80 per person, especially since my son doesn’t eat that food and didn’t even get a chair. The chairs were arranged in a half-​circle so anybody sitting in the back had to stand to be able to see anything. My daughter had one song about Santa’s Elves which did not showcase any ballet moves or folk dance moves at all. It was just a bunch of girls with poor dance form running around on stage and throwing their stuffed animals into the air. Granted it did take some work to get the choreography right, but I didn’t see anything artistic about it. You can tell a lot about a dance school by watching its students perform and this performance was not to my levels of expectation. To top this off, my daughter forgot her stuffed dog they required, when we came to retrieve it after winter break, it was gone. I emailed Judy requesting it to be found, letting her know it was a new bday gift from a best friend, and that she was in tears over the loss. Judy never offered to help us locate it. Judy ignored my request. Nepotism runs this place with Sherene being Judy’s daughter. They’re insensitive.