Week 13: Dance

It was examined today how dance can be taught and learnt in an effectual way that encourages one’s unique creativity to be explored alongside the imaginative interpretation of ideas. We explored in the lecture how different stimuli (including visual, kinaesthetic, auditory, tactile and ideational) have the ability to stir and evoke ideas of creativity within a person and reflect their interpretive approach in a practical demonstration. This was examined more deeply within our dance workshops, which were based upon the children’s book ‘Henry and Amy: (Right-Way-Round and Upside Down)’ by Stephen Michael King.

After reading the text, we did a series of locomotive and progressive warm-up activities that encouraged us to ‘get in the zone’. One particularly engaging activity that followed this was a dance version of ‘Chinese Whispers’: students formed a line, and had to pass on a short dance sequence that either represented the character of Henry or Amy, to the next person in the line. The final person was required to perform what they believed was passed on to them, and it was interesting to observe the way people interpreted other peoples dance sequence, modified movements, increased/decreased dynamics etc. Overall, it was a very enjoyable and engaging activity that I will definitely be using in my future classroom. I also had the idea that one could use a similar modification of the game for drama ‘Chinese Charades’. The first person in a line would receive a sentence that they had to act out to the next person, and so on. The final person would have to act out what had been passed on to them, and would attempt to phrase this into a sentence. The original and final sentence would be compared, and the class could discuss various drama techniques that were employed, as well as the significance of interpretation in performance.

To wrap up the dance workshop, groups were formed and we were instructed to create a dance sequence that either represented the character of Amy, Henry, or a combination of the two characters. My group was allocated the combination of Amy and Henry. We titled our dance ‘The Journey of the Shadows’, and created a dance that symbolised Amy’s journey of taking the uncoordinated Henry around and teaching him how things were to be done properly. Eventually, Henry got the knack of things, and a playful ending represented their friendship restored back to balance, with Amy no longer being as ‘bossy’ as she once had been.

Grumet (1998) points out that one’s contact with text, alongside a personal interpretation, assists in the development of a performance. 

Performance simultaneously confirms and undermines the text. The body of the actor, like the body of the text, stumbles into ambiguity, insinuating more than words can say with gesture, movement, intonation. Mimesis tumbles into transformation, and meaning, taken from the text, rescued from the underworld of negotiation, becomes the very ground of action. (p. 149)

In conclusion, a compelling TEDTalks presentation, 'Do Schools Kill Creativity?’ Sir Ken Robinson discusses intelligence, creativity, and the necessity of the arts within schooling. Robinson highlights the traditional public schooling as a product of both industrialisation and academia, of the need to train people for jobs and to attend college, which all ultimately suppress children’s creative capacities. Robinson asserts that schooling that honors creative intelligence, which is diverse, dynamic, and distinct, is necessary. As Robinson (2006) states,

Children need math and they need dance and they need to experience and think across disciplinary lines. Creativity is the process of having original ideas that have value. … More often than not it comes through the interaction of different interdisciplinary ways of seeing things.