Dance Week 1

Today was the first day of our Dance class. I am less comfortable with Dance than I am with Drama, however I still believe that  Dance is an important part of the Ontario Curriculum as subjects such as Art, Drama, and Dance help to foster creativity in students and help to encourage different ways of thinking and learning in an academic setting.

This week we focused on the 5 elements of dance from the curriculum, which are the fundamental components of dance.  The 5 Elements are:

 - Body- The instrument of dance. The term body may also refer to the body’s position or shape (e.g., curved, straight, angular, twisted, symmetrical, asymmetrical); also, how the body is moving (e.g., using locomotor or non-locomotor movements).
- Energy- The force with which the body moves (e.g., light, strong, sustained, sudden).
- Relationship- The way in which two or more things are connected to or associated with one another (e.g., dancer to dancer, dancer to object, right arm to left arm).
- Space- The physical area in which the body moves; also, the area surrounding the body.
- Time- An element of dance involving rhythm, tempo, accent, and duration. Time can be based on measured beats, as in music, or on body rhythms, such as breath, emotions, and heartbeat.

When teaching dance, it is important to focus on these 5 elements, and incorporate thinking about these elements as they are the basis for learning the fundamentals of Dance, which students can carry forth with them in their education.

The theory that we focused on this week was Laban's Theory. Here is an explanation of Laban's Theory from our class notes:

Laban looked upon movement as a two-way language process through which the body could communicate by giving and receiving messages.  He believed that movement stems from the inter-dependence of body, mind, and spirit; he understood that our inner life relates to the outer world.  Laban created a theoretical language in order to help the observer understand and record movement objectively.
 
Laban described human movement in terms of four qualities and observed the unique workings of each of these in human beings. He worked from the premise that the way a person moved represented what was going on unconsciously in their inner world. He proposed that when you extend or balance the vocabulary of one, the other likewise shifted and transformed so expanding and enriching the experience of the individual.
Laban’s theories can be viewed in three parts:
1. What moves? (whole body, parts, upper/lower)
2. How do we move? (effort, dynamics, time)
3. Where do we move? (the space around us, personal space, general space) 

Experiential creative movement explores these qualities, leading towards extending a movement vocabulary, giving insight and awareness of others through movement.
Specifically, creative Dance structure is divided into 4 main areas: the body, the effort, the space and the relationship.  

Laban's Movement Analysis Theory

1. The body moves in different ways.
2. The effort can be understood as what action takes place in time, with energy, through space and with flow of movement.
3. The space is where all actions go as the body explores movements.
4. The relationship occurs as two dancers interrelate with their actions.  

Children acquire a movement vocabulary and a whole body of knowledge about movement as they are guided by their teachers through these four areas. It is worth noting that these four areas are constantly interwoven as dance is explored, however, for the purposes of teaching and guiding students, they are separated. 

The Fundamental Concepts have been taken from Laban’s Principles of Movement but have been altered somewhat for teaching purposes. The “Effort” area has been divided into “Time” and “Energy”, so that we have 5 Fundamental Concepts to work with; Body, Space, Time, Energy, Relationship. We focused on Laban's Principles of Movement as they are used to create the 5 fundamental elements of dance.

This week in class we did an activity that I enjoyed and that I thought would work really well in junior/intermediate classroom. The activity revolved around reading a poem, and then, in groups, we came up with a choreographed routine to pair with the words and feeling of the poem. We put a focus on the five elements of dance, specifically energy and space, as well as the choreographic form of unison. I think that this activity would be great to use when trying to teach students how to critically analyze writing/poetry and to understand the emotion the author was trying to convey in his/her piece.

The poem that we used is called Departures by Christine Jackson,

From here to there

A traverse of time and distance

Leaving this place,

This knowing,

This home of my heart

Leaving you

One bold step

Through this tattered old door

Push me over that threshold…

Now!

No…Wait!

Hold me

Fasten me to the floorboards

Pin me in your arms

Hold me here

I hover

Toppling into tomorrow, falling into yesterday

Hand clutching suitcase, heart clutching you

I hover

I hover

I …………

This activity hit on the following cross-curricular expectations for Grade 6:
Language
Reading 1.6: extend understanding of text /ideas by connecting, comparing and contrasting the ideas in them to their own knowledge, experience, and insights, to familiar texts and to the world around them.

Dance
A1.2 use dance as a language to interpret and depict central themes in literature (e.g., develop a movement vocabulary that reinterprets themes such as good versus evil or humans versus nature; construct a dance that explores bravery in a legend or peace in a poem)

 As we did in Drama, we also focused on students with visual impairment. You could modify this activity for students with visual impairment by using verbal/auditory cues instead of relying on the visual cues of their group members movements to remain in unison.