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Building with what we have: turning the first weeks of class into our first dance.  I can’t believe we’re already four weeks into the year. We’ve done so much in such a short time, and now we get to start using all of it to build our first dance. This is really important to me in how I teach. Those first few weeks aren't separate from making dances. Students learn warm-ups, participate in community-building activities, experiment with creative tasks, answer questions, and get comfortable dancing with one another. Along the way, they learn new skills and concepts, and those experiences give us material we can use to build dances. I also encourage students to move with intention and effort from the moment they step into the studio. The whole class is practice for performance. Everything has matters. Choreography can be inspired from anywhere, including the community-building and introductory activities we do during the first week of school. One of my favorites is the “Shape Shop.” Students watch our previous dance concert to get a sense of what the program looks like and draw stick figures of shapes they notice in the choreography. While they watch, I have time to help students get their lockers set up. It’s a win-win. We use the drawings to talk about angles, curves, symmetry, and other elements of shape. Then students look through all of the shapes and “shop” for one they want to work with. Later, those shapes become the beginning poses for our first dance. By September, I start to see those first few weeks really take shape. In Dance 1, we begin with Warm-Up in a Blender, combining sections from the four warm-ups we have learned into one phrase. Then we start adding movement from our first few weeks. We might begin the dance with poses from the Shape Shop, set to the opening beats of one of our warm-up songs. As we build, I introduce canon, mirroring, and other choreographic elements that add texture to the dance, explaining what we are doing along the way. Because we practice the warm-ups on both the right and left sides, it’s easy to explore these new ideas. In Dance 2, we begin exploring how dance connects to personal experience. Using my friend Alicia Langlais’ Dance Dragons Workbook as a starting point, students explore their own history with dance: the positive experiences, challenges, influences, and feelings that have shaped them as dancers. We then use those reflections to create movement, making their own experiences another source for choreography that can come up around dance and performance, and translate those ideas into movement. Personal reflection becomes another source for choreography. I’ve written more about how I use the workbook to build this dance in a previous blog post. In Dance 3, I try to give students lessons based on what I see they need for growth. I watch how they move and create, and I use that to decide where we need to go next. This year, I felt it was important to focus on movement quality and locomotor skills, so I created prompts that gave them a chance to explore those areas while also blending with the choreography I had already given them. The prompts became both a learning opportunity and a way to build the dance. And then we use it all. The goal is for students to experience how to create and use movement, develop it, make choices, connect ideas, and take something that may have started as a simple classroom exercise and turn it into choreography, equipping students with the skills to do this on their own. Photo by Patrick Albert
For more tips like this, check out my book, Choreographing the Curriculum. www.amazon.com/dp/B0DQWYMJY9?lv=shuf&channelId=500&plpRedirect=mhFallback
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