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| Dance in Lower School |
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Students in Lower School have dance once a week for half of the school year. Mountain and Forest have dance experiences from Sept. - Jan. and Sky and River have dance experiences from Feb. - June. Students come in groups of 15 - 16 students per group to the multi and dance for 35 - 45 minutes. A teacher dances with each group and students are asked to remove their shoes and socks before participating. Taking off shoes and socks becomes the transition into and out of the class. Modern dance is done in barefoot so that students can sense their relationship with the earth and learn about the specifics of using their feet properly. An entirely different quality of movement is available to young children when they are barefoot and they can easily translate the concepts and awareness into their life in “shoes.”
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| Curriculum |
| The curriculum varies year to year because efforts are made to integrate dance into the material that the students are already experiencing. This is done in a thoughtful manner so that dance can be primarily a dance/movement class which draws a correlation between movement and the other areas of academic/arts/physical education learning. Lower school has a year long theme such a s “flight” (2002-03), or “small things”, “Native Americans”, “the human body” etc. which often becomes the inspiration for a unit of dance classes. Dance pulls themes from language arts (poetry, movement sentences, images), sports (baseball, basketball), geography (landscapes, volcanoes), art (sculpture, drawing), science (butterflies, circulation, animals, etc. |
Underscoring the integration there is also a technical and choreographic emphasis in the dance classes. Dance has a curriculum of its own but honoring the way that young children and all of us learn, every effort is made to put dance in a context where it can hold personal meaning.
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| River and Sky Classes |
In River and Sky there is focus on articulating specific body parts to enhance coordination, and develop flexibility and strength. Students learn how to follow a set warm up to music, explore their full range of movement,, invent their own movement in response to outside stimulation and remember it, move in a specific rhythm, expand their range of both locomotor and gestural movement, sequence patterns in simple movement sentences and learn simple movement sequences. Skills such as freezing in a shape, transitioning between levels in space and changing directions, skipping, leaping, galloping etc. are emphasized. Explorations of time /space /weight and flow are usually presented by going to the extremes. Dancers will move large/small, fast/slow, high/medium/low, strong/light, in curves/lines, etc. In pairs students will work with mirroring movement, copying movement, echoing movement, shaping in relation to a partner, positive touch and simple ways to work with a partner. At this age one half of the class might share for the other half of the class.
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| Forest and Mountain Classes |
| In Forest and Mountain the experiences become more sophisticated and there is more of an emphasis on design and working with a partner or a group. Students begin to think about what a dance “looks like” as well as what it “feels like” at this age. An emphasis in placed on articulating body parts in sequences to build on their basic knowledge of coordination, flexibility and strength. Warmups become more complicated and full bodied. Dancers will often request to remember the warm up for themselves and perform it with little prompting. Depending on the needs of a particular group, dancers will learn contra lateral movement patterns, ways to balance and work with body half's, simple spacial scales based on the work of Rudolph Laban, and the intricacies of elevations and falls. This age delights in mastering a skill and learning an appropriately challenging sequence of movement. |
| Mapping is introduced and students begin to record their dances. A floor pattern or air pattern will be drawn so that students can visualize, recreate and eventually polish their movement. At times students have explored folk dancing and ways of moving through a set movement and spacial pattern. Props are used when appropriate to help students extend their lines out into the space and to help them visualize movement in space. The concept of transitions between movements and sections of a dance is introduced in a more sophisticated manner. Students will often perform for each other during the class period. Sometimes students will go one at a time (i.e. sharing their individual flight patterns, or each group of students will share a short study created within certain limitations.) Students comment on the work of others and begin to understand what makes a dance work. When appropriate, students have been videotaped (the “crawfish” dance or the “volcano” dance) or opportunities are provided for performing outside of the class (Stone Circle Celebration, Kwanzaa Celebration (Dee) ). Students will occasionally look at the work of a choreographer and respond to their work. |
| A strength of this program has always been the willingness of the Lower School teachers to integrate the language of movement into their own classroom experiences and to speak of and draw a correlation during the dance class and classroom experiences. Lower School has been willing to adjust schedules and take students to lunchtime sharings by Middle School students and performances for Upper School students that allow children to experience dance first hand. Guest artists are occasionally brought in to share partnering (Jude Woodcock) or African dance (Sherone Price & Beverly Botsford.) A highlight of the year is when the Lower School children and Staff attend a special showing of the Upper School Dance Concert. |
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