A year ago I welcomed on these pages Dantzerti, a theatre and dance school set up by the Basque Government in Bilbao. It opened its doors in September, is completing the first course and is good news for the performing arts sector. But the deficiencies I expected in my welcome are still more serious a year later.

The residence chosen for the school implantation, the Arriaga Conservatory, is not adequate. Teachers and first-year students can give an account of this. The classrooms for the teaching of dance are too small, as they are designed for the teaching of music, and it is not necessary to explain them, the needs of music and dance are different in relation to space. On the other hand, the school has no theater. A theater and dance school without theater? Yes, it is true. The Conservatory has an audience prepared for music, without theatre, and its implantation in a building where there are no educational theatres for professionals who will have their main place of work is a wrong and serious decision.

For Basque dancers there is something worse. In Dantzerti, at the Basque School of Dramatic Art and Dance, there is no possibility of doing Basque dance studies. I will write this again, so incomprehensible and intolerable, that it makes me incredible, and I will see if I read it also twice: In Dantzerti there is no possibility of performing Basque dance studies. Does anyone imagine the Faculty of Philology in Vitoria-Gasteiz with the possibility of studying German, French and Hispanic philology, but without Basque Philology? Well, that's what we have when it comes to dance in Bilbao, and that's not what it was 50 years ago, that's 2016.

In dance groups, dance schools, general education schools, culture houses and leisure areas, in Gipuzkoa alone there are about 300 teachers and about 10,000 students working on the transmission of Basque dance. It is becoming more and more common to teach Basque dance in the Music and Dance schools that have been created village to village. In these cases, the teacher needs the title of the teaching area of violin, guitar or trumpet. And to teach Basque dance? To teach Basque dance there is no need for qualification or studies, anyone can be a professor of Euskal Dantza.

In fact, the Department of Education, instead of offering the studies to be a Basque dance teacher, gives qualifications. Anyone can make a request in the Basque Government, tell him what he has done and where he has been in the dance world, and he is already, has an official stamp to be a Basque dance teacher. You don't need to learn anything, the Department of Education gives you an enabling. In recent years the Basque Government has been making a number of concessions and it seems that it intends to continue in the same way, as it does not intend to offer any study on Basque dance.