distance learning choreography projects (1)

 Okay, about those choreography projects… Last spring, in emergency distance learning mode, I gave in and figured out assignments that each student could create and post individually – for the Jazz 1 students, I reverted to the Cinquain project (which I had originally planned to be the 4th-quarter lead-up project before the narrative final), in which they create their own simple poem in cinquain form, then create a dance to it; for Jazz 2, I made up a dancing with objects assignment, for students to find one thing in their houses to create a dance around (I have Wendy Jones from Lowell High School in SF to thank for the idea for that one).

But when this year started, with no prospects of going back to in-person in the dance room anytime soon, I was determined that this year’s students would not miss out on the concepts and curriculum I have refined over all of these years! So, somehow, we needed to be able to complete our choreography projects remotely. Due to breakout rooms, it mostly worked – the trick was finding the projects that were at least not too confusing to do over Zoom!

Jazz 1 began with our usual axial and locomotor movement / directions and facings project. I explained to the class, as I always do, that beginning choreographers tend to do a lot of movement in one place, facing the audience, so this project is designed to break them of that habit right away. The three main elements of the assignment were: 1. have a good beginning and ending; 2. do at least as much traveling movement as movement in one place; and 3. do at least as much movement facing sideways or backwards as facing your audience/camera. (I usually also require traveling movement in multiple directions, but this time I figured that getting any amount of real locomotor movement would be as much as I could hope for in their small spaces.) I made the assignment sheet that I usually hand out physically to each group into a PDF file, posted on their Google Classroom page so that they could keep referring to it, and I also reminded them of those three main points every time I saw them! They worked on their projects in groups in breakout rooms, and I recorded them in their breakout rooms as well. Instead of watching each others’ projects performed in real time in the dance room, students were asked to choose four of their classmates’ recordings to watch and respond to. All things considered, it worked out as well as I could have hoped for.

The second choreography project was a challenge – again, I did not want to completely give up on my usual Shapes and Levels project! I think it is the one project I have carried through all of my years of teaching, having gotten it from my master teachers during my student teaching year… I love it for the second project because after letting them use whatever music and steps they like for the first project (to get them hooked on the idea of creating together), I then hit them with a project that does not depend on “steps” and uses only amorphous background music – and it often seems to turn their thinking in a new direction and jolt them into new ideas of what choreography can be. The usual form is to create a dance of at least six group still shapes, three symmetrical and three asymmetrical, incorporating low and high levels, and using movements only for transitions.

Of course, the immediate problem here is that we can’t create anything like the group still shapes we would have in the dance room – I had to think differently about shapes myself! So I looked up some dance performances created through Zoom, and took some screen shots of interesting shapes to share with the students. I did still require symmetry and asymmetry for the assignment (I found plenty of examples in the screenshots), and asked for at least some changes in level; but I also asked them to think about using things we couldn’t ordinarily do in person – such as proximity to the camera, or reaching body parts across screens – to make their shapes interesting.  Some of the groups did some excellent work for their second-ever choreography project!

More catching up – a whole semester (plus) of distance learning

 So, as we came back to school for a semester of distance learning (now into the second semester, but that’s another story), our leadership team decided to switch to a 4x3 schedule: instead of having seven classes at once, students would take four classes (whichever were the odd-numbered classes in their schedules) in the fall, and then three (the even-numbered ones) in the spring. The reasoning behind this was that last spring, in our emergency-distance-learning mode, many students (including the multiple-AP class, straight-A students) felt completely overwhelmed dealing with seven classes at once online; and with students completing their classes in one semester, them moving on to another set of classes, it made it more like a college schedule where classes always finish in one semester.

So the 4x3 schedule made perfect sense… The only problem was that under our daily class schedule we saw each class for 55 minutes four times a week (every day but Friday, which was set aside for catching up on homework) – so the total hours we were with each class was about equal to the hours we would ordinarily be with them in a regular semester, while we were expected to cover the curriculum for a whole year.

So that meant narrowing down my curriculum to the absolute essentials… which actually became an interesting exercise in refining my usual plans to make them as meaningful as possible – always a good practice! I think the process helped me think a bit more clearly and make changes that I will want to keep when we are able to return in person.

For the Jazz 1 and Jazz 2 classes, I was able to cover two or three major dance forms each quarter, and two creative work units / choreography projects each quarter. I had always been somewhat dissatisfied with our district’s designation of our main college-prep dance classes as “Jazz Dance 1” and “Jazz Dance 2” – I always had to assure potential students that “we do so much more than just jazz dance”… But after reading many articles on anti-racist dance teaching in the wake of the summer of Black Lives Matter protests, I embraced our jazz dance focus in a whole new way. I was inspired by Amy Compton’s work on introducing her class to jazz dance during shelter-in-place (with lots of really excellent links!), and also a number of articles from the Journal of Dance Education on anti-racist dance teaching… I had already taught jazz as an African-derived dance form, going back to learn traditional jazz dances of the Harlem Renaissance after starting with really basic steps in the beginning of the year; so this year, I just tweaked the curriculum a bit to make the message clearer. I started with showing a couple of videos on the history of jazz and the history of African-American social dances (that one is from a TED-ed presentation by Camille Brown, and is dynamite!) to visually show the connections, then proceeded from there, always continuing the message that jazz came from the Black community.

So for the fall semester, both Jazz 1 and Jazz 2 began with jazz as their first technical unit, then Jazz 1 took on traditional jazz in the form of Big Apple and a bit of Charleston, while Jazz 2 moved on to complete a lyrical jazz combination. In the second quarter (this year’s equivalent of spring semester), Jazz 1 was able to experience Congolese/Central African dance, Baile Folklórico, and Hawai’ian hula; will Jazz 2 studied African-Haitian dance, Brazilian Samba, and Hawai’ian hula. Of course, there was only so much we could all do, through the computer screen and in smallish spaces, but I was actually amazed at how well many of the students were able to absorb such distinct and varied styles! We also managed creative work and choreography projects, but I think perhaps that is a subject for another post… as is what the Dance Production class did this year.