I know of more than one occasion when a friend was passed up for a role after an excellent audition because they had to answer in the negative about being handy with a foil or rapier. It is, in most cases, a discipline more interesting to singers than dance and certainly more useful. Concerning diction classes, I have always felt the need for a professional singer to be teaching the classes rather than a coach or accompanist without stage experience. While I believe diction is a function of good technique and training, many of those polled agreed that diction should be taught by a qualified, experienced singer. Another subject that was broached was the need for recitative classes.
Recitatives are in some cases more demanding than any aria.
Full of contrasting emotions and many dynamic changes, it is a textbook of Mozart style encapsulated into two pages. Maybe we could teach better style and diction without the need for singing entire arias which sooner or later come off sounding like everyone else's attempts at the same piece of music. To balance this seemingly negative tirade into a world better left unremembered, I would like to offer two positive ideas that were given me by one colleague. The first is Improv Class. He relates that not until the student relaxed a little, through the use of the Improv classes, could they make any headway at all into the complex character of Guglielmo.