Dance Workshop #1

Dance Workshop Week 1 with Jacqui Dreessens

“Making Ideas Dance”

Thursday 12^th July

For the introduction to the class we briefly wrote on a piece of paper why we had chosen dance. We then placed the pieces of paper in the middle of the room to be read out. Jacqui chose people to come up and read what others had written. I chose dance because it is something I have never done before and I want to be taken out of my comfort zone a little bit – not only to challenge myself but to also understand what it feels like to be asked to do something that you’re not 100% comfortable about, so when I ask students to take a risk I’ll know how they are feeling and be able to support them.

Jacqui noticed that the majority of the class was feeling uneasy looking at themselves in the mirror. To give us more confidence and feel comfortable she pulled the curtains over the mirror so we weren’t focused on that.

The warm-up activity consisted of mirroring Jacqui and moving and running around into spaces with gaps. 

We used body percussion such as yelling and shrieking, clapping our hands, stomping our feet and so on.

We explored different levels and balanced on one foot, crouched down to touch our feet and stretched up to the sky.

We then became a ‘school of fish.’ In this activity, as a whole group, we contracted the space and followed the ‘leader’ in an attempt to have the whole group moving in unison. We changed leaders, direction, levels, vibrated parts of our body such as our hands, flowed and explored the space with our bodies and moved in the way we thought a fish might. Whilst this activity was going on, there was a visual display of some fish under the sea projected onto the wall. This display gave ideas to the group about what they might like to move as next.

After the school of fish activity finished we got into groups of 6 and were asked to present a short underwater scene. We had to think about the macro perspective of the scene, this means we had to think about what we were going to be, where were we going to go and why, and the resolution.

As a group, we created a story and then looked at the micro-perspective. This meant that we chose ways in which to move our bodies and use the space to show the story to the class. We added detail and focused on the principals we were using, including speed, direction, levels, dimension, stillness, duration, vibratory etc.

 

Integrating dance into other subject areas:

This dance lesson could be integrated into subjects such as science and geography/humanities. In science, you could link fish and the ocean to the conservation of coral reefs and marine life. If you were teaching this class to grade 1/2’s (vels level 2) you could also explore the life cycle of a fish. The learning focus for level 2 in science suggests that students “observe and describe phenomena; for example, life cycles. Students expand their simple scientific vocabulary by using words and terms for [such] concepts.” (VCAA, 2009)

In geography you could explore where certain species of fish live, or which countries have coral reefs and so on.

Personal Reflection

I really enjoyed this class because it didn’t matter that I had never done dance before. The activities that we did required no professional ‘skill’ so I never felt that I couldn’t do something. I didn’t feel uncomfortable at all in any of the activities because Jacqui had set up the classroom so that we had lots of time to explore and practice moving like fish before we had to perform. I liked how we were able to perform in groups; this made the performance a lot less scary and more fun. Throughout the lesson, we went from a simple motif of moving like fish and we took it much further by thinking about the ways in which we can move our bodies to create stories and show them to others

References:

Victorian Curriculum and Assessment Authority [VCAA], 2009, Science Level 2 Learning Focus, State Government of Victoria, retrieved 21 July 2012, <http://vels.vcaa.vic.edu.au/vels/level2.html>