Tuesday, February 17, 2015
performing Lindy hop for the whole school!
While working on Samba we also continued to run the Lindy hop / Big Apple piece once per class, as eight pairs of dancers had signed up to perform it at a rally in front of the entire school (our first official performance, since the Thriller flash mob was more of a... well, a flash mob)! The rally happened last Friday in the gym, and the dancers did very well — great energy, even after a false start due to technical difficulties with the sound system. They were well-received with cheers from the audience, and afterward many teachers told me how glad they were to see dance return to our school. All-in-all a success for our first full-school performance!
Spring semester and world dance
After introducing dance technique with jazz and historical social dances in the fall, my spring semester in Beginning Dance usually focuses on various world dance forms (along with creative work and choreography, of course). This progression has worked well for me for years, as teens are hungry to learn new dance forms, and it is important to me to validate non-Western dance forms. I have usually taught some African-Haitian or Congolese, Baile Folklórico, Brazilian Samba, Polynesian (Hawai'ian hula and Tahitian 'ori), and ballet, which I do present as a world dance form (European classical dance). Of course, I am not an expert in all of these forms, but I introduce them as dance forms I have learned and would like to share.
This year, I polled the students on which forms they are most interested in, to prioritize in case we don't have time for everything, and three styles overwhelmingly stood out: Brazilian Samba, Hawai'ian hula, and ballet (that last one actually surprised me a bit... but ballet is still ubiquitous in popular culture as the epitome of concert dance, so perhaps it is natural that students would be curious to learn it). We began with Samba — since Brazilian Carnaval happens mid-February, the beginning of the month is the perfect time to learn it. I explain to my students that there are many styles of Samba, but the style I learned is the traditional folkloric style, with a flat-footed basic step (I learned from Conceição Damasceno of the World Dance Center in Berkeley); I add steps I have learned from colleagues who dance with various Samba companies in the bay area as well.
Naturally we also learn some of the history and culture of Samba, and the responses to the reading handout have been interesting — many students hadn't realized that Samba was an African-diaspora dance form. Our time working on Samba has been joyful, as students have responded to this energetic and exuberant dance (not to mention the intense music)!
This year, I polled the students on which forms they are most interested in, to prioritize in case we don't have time for everything, and three styles overwhelmingly stood out: Brazilian Samba, Hawai'ian hula, and ballet (that last one actually surprised me a bit... but ballet is still ubiquitous in popular culture as the epitome of concert dance, so perhaps it is natural that students would be curious to learn it). We began with Samba — since Brazilian Carnaval happens mid-February, the beginning of the month is the perfect time to learn it. I explain to my students that there are many styles of Samba, but the style I learned is the traditional folkloric style, with a flat-footed basic step (I learned from Conceição Damasceno of the World Dance Center in Berkeley); I add steps I have learned from colleagues who dance with various Samba companies in the bay area as well.
Naturally we also learn some of the history and culture of Samba, and the responses to the reading handout have been interesting — many students hadn't realized that Samba was an African-diaspora dance form. Our time working on Samba has been joyful, as students have responded to this energetic and exuberant dance (not to mention the intense music)!
Wednesday, February 11, 2015
reflections on the tempos project
I got behind on my writing as I spent a good chunk of last weekend and quite a few evenings ensconsed with my video camera and choreography rubrics, grading the tempo variations projects... But after viewing twenty-one projects (many times each), I think I can at least say I am encouraged with the results of some adjustments in the way I've been teaching it over the years.
When I first started assigning this project, way back in my student-teaching days, it was very cut-and-dried: create a 16-count movement phrase and perform the same phrase in three tempos: medium, half-time, and double-time. From this, I think students learned what half-time and double-time were — but not really very much about varying tempo for choreographic effect. In the intervening years, I had tried broadening the project by simply requiring three distinct tempos, but students often wound up with movements only marginally slower or faster (sometimes they would even ask if they could mix three songs, in slightly different tempos, so that they could stay "on the beat"). This time I did allow them to use three tempos any way they liked, but stressed very strongly how extremely different they should be ("think s-u-p-e-r slow-mo"... "think hyperspeed!").
I also expanded just a bit on the lead-up creative work this year — for many years in the past, I would give one creative-work lesson on tempo/speed, then follow up the next day by trying already-learned dance phrases in double-time and half-time; but this time I used two days for creative work on speed. And, of course, the third major change was restricting them to instrumental music.
It's hard to say which of these adjustments made the difference (probably a combination of all three), but this was the first time that I saw almost all groups using tempo variations, clearly and purposefully, the way they should be used: to make choreography more interesting and engaging. Nearly all groups clearly showed three very distinct tempos, and nearly all mixed them in some unique ways. Even groups who haven't yet gained the skill or confidence for full-out, polished performances created some lovely little studies... One group juxtaposed a slow body roll with a fast, accented arm movement in a repeated pattern; another repeated their opening movements at the end of their dance in slow-motion, creating unity and variety long before I taught the concepts; still another began their dance with slow, curling hand movements, reflected those movements with undulating torsos, then kept repeating hand and torso movements in increasingly fast tempos until they ended with fast shoulder isolations.
So... while it would be tempting to think that I simply taught the project so well this year that my students really got it for the first time, my suspicion is that what actually made the most difference was the instrumental music. I'm remembering back to when we first did the ancestors project at EOSA, and how being required to work in a new style jolted those dancers out of their hip-hop-and-Cumbia comfort zones and into an entirely new level of choreography — and I think perhaps in much the same way, having that crutch of their favorite songs taken away gave these students the freedom to think about their movement in a new way. In that case, I may have just found a good progression of projects to start my Beginning Dance classes: starting off with directions and facings, an easily accessible project danced to their requested songs, letting them begin the year in their comfort zone so as not to scare them off; then the Symmetrical and Asymmetrical Shapes project, danced to amorphous music to break them out of their comfort zones; then the tempos project, requiring instrumentals to help them continue growing and risking new ideas... We'll see how it goes from here!
When I first started assigning this project, way back in my student-teaching days, it was very cut-and-dried: create a 16-count movement phrase and perform the same phrase in three tempos: medium, half-time, and double-time. From this, I think students learned what half-time and double-time were — but not really very much about varying tempo for choreographic effect. In the intervening years, I had tried broadening the project by simply requiring three distinct tempos, but students often wound up with movements only marginally slower or faster (sometimes they would even ask if they could mix three songs, in slightly different tempos, so that they could stay "on the beat"). This time I did allow them to use three tempos any way they liked, but stressed very strongly how extremely different they should be ("think s-u-p-e-r slow-mo"... "think hyperspeed!").
I also expanded just a bit on the lead-up creative work this year — for many years in the past, I would give one creative-work lesson on tempo/speed, then follow up the next day by trying already-learned dance phrases in double-time and half-time; but this time I used two days for creative work on speed. And, of course, the third major change was restricting them to instrumental music.
It's hard to say which of these adjustments made the difference (probably a combination of all three), but this was the first time that I saw almost all groups using tempo variations, clearly and purposefully, the way they should be used: to make choreography more interesting and engaging. Nearly all groups clearly showed three very distinct tempos, and nearly all mixed them in some unique ways. Even groups who haven't yet gained the skill or confidence for full-out, polished performances created some lovely little studies... One group juxtaposed a slow body roll with a fast, accented arm movement in a repeated pattern; another repeated their opening movements at the end of their dance in slow-motion, creating unity and variety long before I taught the concepts; still another began their dance with slow, curling hand movements, reflected those movements with undulating torsos, then kept repeating hand and torso movements in increasingly fast tempos until they ended with fast shoulder isolations.
So... while it would be tempting to think that I simply taught the project so well this year that my students really got it for the first time, my suspicion is that what actually made the most difference was the instrumental music. I'm remembering back to when we first did the ancestors project at EOSA, and how being required to work in a new style jolted those dancers out of their hip-hop-and-Cumbia comfort zones and into an entirely new level of choreography — and I think perhaps in much the same way, having that crutch of their favorite songs taken away gave these students the freedom to think about their movement in a new way. In that case, I may have just found a good progression of projects to start my Beginning Dance classes: starting off with directions and facings, an easily accessible project danced to their requested songs, letting them begin the year in their comfort zone so as not to scare them off; then the Symmetrical and Asymmetrical Shapes project, danced to amorphous music to break them out of their comfort zones; then the tempos project, requiring instrumentals to help them continue growing and risking new ideas... We'll see how it goes from here!
Sunday, February 1, 2015
tempo variations
The dance classes opened spring semester with a short creative work unit on tempo variations. I wanted to work fairly quickly on this one because we only had 3-½ weeks between the beginning of the semester and our February break (officially called "Presidents' week," unofficially "ski week"), in which to cover one creative-work unit and one world dance unit — so I asked the students to make slightly smaller groups for their choreography project in order to get it done more quickly (big groups do tend to get a bit unwieldy).
We began, of course, with a couple of lessons on tempo. The first day, I gave them a fairly extended exploration, trying various actions (tiptoe, glide, slither, twist, skip, gallop, swing, sway...) in different tempos (slower... slower... s-u-p-e-r slow-mo... faster... faster... hyperspeed!) as well as acceleration and deceleration. We tried a single movement in one count and stretched it out to 2, 4, and 8 counts; then reversed the process by making a short phrase in 8 counts then speeding it up to fit into 4 and 2 counts. We danced across the room in 8 counts, then 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2... (both of these are venerable exercises from Anne Green Gilbert's Creative Dance for All Ages, if I'm not mistaken). We had to leave out the composition piece that day because it was a very short school day.
The second day we warmed up with the "whimsical minute" — a wonderful little exercise from Blom and Chaplin's The Intimate Act of Choreography in how we perceive time: the dancers free dance very slowly, to slow music, until they think one minute has passed, then freeze; they then do the same but dancing quickly to fast music. It is always interesting to see the range of perceived minutes — there is always close to a half-minute difference between the first dancer to freeze and the last, and the times are always much shorter the second time around, with the fast movement. We then explored variations of traveling, turning, jumping, sliding, swinging, and shaking; after plenty of exploration for lots of ideas, dancers were asked to create a short phrase with just four of those actions. After they created their phrases, we tried them with the same tempo variations we had explored the previous day, then the final composition piece was to revise the phrase using one or more of the tempo variations.
The group choreography project was very simple: create a short dance (30 seconds to a minute) that uses three very distinct tempos. I specified that their medium tempo should be what they think of as "on the beat," their fast should be at least doubletime ("think hyperspeed") and their slow should be at least halftime ("think super slow-mo"). They could mix their tempos however they wished, as long as there was enough of each to register for the viewer. My last big requirement was that we would work to instrumental music — I would play them songs from my pop beats playlist, so they could use tunes they were familiar with (in the karaoke versions), but I stressed that I didn't want the words to distract them from their movement.
We are only halfway done with the showings (about half showed Thursday and Friday, the rest will show tomorrow). So far they are mostly doing well — I'm seeing some lovely solutions to mixing tempos, turning into interesting accents. One pair that stood out for me began a fast connected turn, suddenly slowed down to complete the turn in slow motion, then sped up to repeat it quickly while letting go of the connection — very effective. My one slight disappointment so far was with one group of excellent performers who begged and pleaded to be able to perform their dance to their actual song with words (which they of course had on their phones), so I caved in and let them... The dance was obviously well-rehearsed and performed with great energy, using a variety of tempos — but it was an object lesson in song lyrics distracting from movement creativity, as so many of the movements were just mimicking the lyrics (if not taken straight from the music video) — what I would call "Mickey Mouse-ing" the movement. If nothing else, it gives me a chance to remind students in the future exactly why I will keep them working to instrumentals for a while!
We began, of course, with a couple of lessons on tempo. The first day, I gave them a fairly extended exploration, trying various actions (tiptoe, glide, slither, twist, skip, gallop, swing, sway...) in different tempos (slower... slower... s-u-p-e-r slow-mo... faster... faster... hyperspeed!) as well as acceleration and deceleration. We tried a single movement in one count and stretched it out to 2, 4, and 8 counts; then reversed the process by making a short phrase in 8 counts then speeding it up to fit into 4 and 2 counts. We danced across the room in 8 counts, then 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2... (both of these are venerable exercises from Anne Green Gilbert's Creative Dance for All Ages, if I'm not mistaken). We had to leave out the composition piece that day because it was a very short school day.
The second day we warmed up with the "whimsical minute" — a wonderful little exercise from Blom and Chaplin's The Intimate Act of Choreography in how we perceive time: the dancers free dance very slowly, to slow music, until they think one minute has passed, then freeze; they then do the same but dancing quickly to fast music. It is always interesting to see the range of perceived minutes — there is always close to a half-minute difference between the first dancer to freeze and the last, and the times are always much shorter the second time around, with the fast movement. We then explored variations of traveling, turning, jumping, sliding, swinging, and shaking; after plenty of exploration for lots of ideas, dancers were asked to create a short phrase with just four of those actions. After they created their phrases, we tried them with the same tempo variations we had explored the previous day, then the final composition piece was to revise the phrase using one or more of the tempo variations.
The group choreography project was very simple: create a short dance (30 seconds to a minute) that uses three very distinct tempos. I specified that their medium tempo should be what they think of as "on the beat," their fast should be at least doubletime ("think hyperspeed") and their slow should be at least halftime ("think super slow-mo"). They could mix their tempos however they wished, as long as there was enough of each to register for the viewer. My last big requirement was that we would work to instrumental music — I would play them songs from my pop beats playlist, so they could use tunes they were familiar with (in the karaoke versions), but I stressed that I didn't want the words to distract them from their movement.
We are only halfway done with the showings (about half showed Thursday and Friday, the rest will show tomorrow). So far they are mostly doing well — I'm seeing some lovely solutions to mixing tempos, turning into interesting accents. One pair that stood out for me began a fast connected turn, suddenly slowed down to complete the turn in slow motion, then sped up to repeat it quickly while letting go of the connection — very effective. My one slight disappointment so far was with one group of excellent performers who begged and pleaded to be able to perform their dance to their actual song with words (which they of course had on their phones), so I caved in and let them... The dance was obviously well-rehearsed and performed with great energy, using a variety of tempos — but it was an object lesson in song lyrics distracting from movement creativity, as so many of the movements were just mimicking the lyrics (if not taken straight from the music video) — what I would call "Mickey Mouse-ing" the movement. If nothing else, it gives me a chance to remind students in the future exactly why I will keep them working to instrumentals for a while!
Sunday, January 25, 2015
fall semester wrap-up... and on to the next
Finals are over, and the fall semester is done. We finished two full creative-work units, with lessons on the elements and group choreography projects — working mostly on the element of Space, with locomotor and axial movement, directions and facings, levels, and symmetrical and asymmetrical shapes. Two choreography projects is considerably less than I would like to have done in one semester... but that was at least partly due to letting students have the time they felt they needed to perfect their first projects to their satisfaction, so perhaps that fits in with the ethic of "less is more"; and I was able to fit in some other creative-work lessons between projects, which I hope to build on further.
As for the technical side, we completed three different short dances, learning some basic jazz technique and a bit about Katherine Dunham as well as some traditional / historical jazz in the form of Lindy hop and Big Apple. A large contingent of dancers (nearly 40) got daring enough to perform in front of most of the school in the Hallowe'en Thriller flashmob, and a couple dozen of them are preparing to perform the Lindy hop piece for the whole school at the next assembly — not bad for beginners!
Along the way, I think we've managed to establish a classroom community where students feel safe to dance, create, and take risks in front of each other — definitely a good start, and something to build on as I work on moving them into making meaning with dance...
One happy problem I had this first semester was around how to tweak my daily participation rubric to differentiate among my (huge majority of) students who fully participate to their best ability every day. While I was at EOSA, my classes were small — never more than 25, and mostly between twelve and twenty — so it was relatively simple to evaluate each student on fulfilling the learning targets at the end of each class. Then last year, in a school where most students expected any class within the PE program meant free play, so few made the effort to participate in the lessons that differentiation was easy — my problem was just getting enough students to participate enough to pass my class. Now that I am in a school where students have the expectation of coming prepared and staying focused on class, I started to wonder if too many of my students were earning A's (if that is a problem, it is certainly a more pleasant problem to have!). After checking with some dance teacher colleagues and finding that my very simple rubric does accord with theirs, I solved the dilemma by deciding not to worry about it too much... At least not this year, as we're getting the program off the ground and all the classes are Beginning Dance, it's really okay for the majority of students to be able to succeed just by doing what they're supposed to do, to the best of their abilities, every day (and there are always written work and choreography projects to help differentiate). I can always tweak the rubric to make it harder for more advanced levels...next year!
So now we are on to spring semester... Since we ended the fall semester doing technique for performance finals, we are starting this one with creative work — moving on to the element of Time with tempo variations. As usual in the spring, I have plans to teach a lot of world / multicultural dance forms — I always include a little Baile Folklórico and a little African-Haitian or Congolese, along with some Polynesian; it appears the three forms the students are most interested in are Brazilian Samba, Hawai'ian hula, and (this one surprised me) classical ballet, so we will most certainly cover those. I would like to get in a lot more creative work — contrasts, some work on choreographic forms, something that will lead to a collaborative dance for each class that they can perform at our informal concert at the end of the year, as well as the choreography final (I usually give them a narrative form project for that one)... so much to cover in so little time! Well, we'll see how it goes — I have to keep reminding myself that my curriculum at EOSA didn't really get settled for a few years, so whatever happens here, it is a good start.
As for the technical side, we completed three different short dances, learning some basic jazz technique and a bit about Katherine Dunham as well as some traditional / historical jazz in the form of Lindy hop and Big Apple. A large contingent of dancers (nearly 40) got daring enough to perform in front of most of the school in the Hallowe'en Thriller flashmob, and a couple dozen of them are preparing to perform the Lindy hop piece for the whole school at the next assembly — not bad for beginners!
Along the way, I think we've managed to establish a classroom community where students feel safe to dance, create, and take risks in front of each other — definitely a good start, and something to build on as I work on moving them into making meaning with dance...
One happy problem I had this first semester was around how to tweak my daily participation rubric to differentiate among my (huge majority of) students who fully participate to their best ability every day. While I was at EOSA, my classes were small — never more than 25, and mostly between twelve and twenty — so it was relatively simple to evaluate each student on fulfilling the learning targets at the end of each class. Then last year, in a school where most students expected any class within the PE program meant free play, so few made the effort to participate in the lessons that differentiation was easy — my problem was just getting enough students to participate enough to pass my class. Now that I am in a school where students have the expectation of coming prepared and staying focused on class, I started to wonder if too many of my students were earning A's (if that is a problem, it is certainly a more pleasant problem to have!). After checking with some dance teacher colleagues and finding that my very simple rubric does accord with theirs, I solved the dilemma by deciding not to worry about it too much... At least not this year, as we're getting the program off the ground and all the classes are Beginning Dance, it's really okay for the majority of students to be able to succeed just by doing what they're supposed to do, to the best of their abilities, every day (and there are always written work and choreography projects to help differentiate). I can always tweak the rubric to make it harder for more advanced levels...next year!
So now we are on to spring semester... Since we ended the fall semester doing technique for performance finals, we are starting this one with creative work — moving on to the element of Time with tempo variations. As usual in the spring, I have plans to teach a lot of world / multicultural dance forms — I always include a little Baile Folklórico and a little African-Haitian or Congolese, along with some Polynesian; it appears the three forms the students are most interested in are Brazilian Samba, Hawai'ian hula, and (this one surprised me) classical ballet, so we will most certainly cover those. I would like to get in a lot more creative work — contrasts, some work on choreographic forms, something that will lead to a collaborative dance for each class that they can perform at our informal concert at the end of the year, as well as the choreography final (I usually give them a narrative form project for that one)... so much to cover in so little time! Well, we'll see how it goes — I have to keep reminding myself that my curriculum at EOSA didn't really get settled for a few years, so whatever happens here, it is a good start.
Wednesday, January 14, 2015
getting the point…
I can tell kids that dance is learned through daily practice until I'm blue in the face, but usually they just have to figure it out for themselves... In a dance journal reflection on her first semester in Dance, one of my students wrote: “the first quarter I started off pretty bad, but now I have been improving, participating every day. Well, I don’t know… when you really do participate the dances stick to you – when you just watch the class you may know the moves but you’re just not able to dance it.” Priceless!
Sunday, January 11, 2015
end-of-semester dance practice
Since I decided against a fall semester choreography final (because of the inconvenient timing of winter break), this week the dance classes have been practicing all four dance sequences we have learned over the semester. Students will choose their one best dance to perform for the final, in small-to-medium groups. The dances we learned are:
1. Basic jazz — the vocabulary of jazz squares, pivots, pas de bourées, and kick ball-changes that are the standard building blocks of so much musical theater choreography. I like to set my jazz dances to classic Motown; this year it is Marvin Gaye's version of "I Heard it Through the Grapevine" (a bit of a dance joke, since our first step is a grapevine).
2. Michael Jackson's Thriller, which we performed at Hallowe'en — and which I keep reminding them is a jazz dance, choreographed in Fosse style.
3. Hip hop — I always tell students I don't teach much hip hop per se, even though they all want to learn it, because "you know more than I do"; but I did reconstruct a one-minute bit of choreography from one of EOSA's dance festival pieces, which we worked on for a week.
4. Last but certainly not least, Lindy hop and Big Apple, which we worked on just before the break. I am particularly fond of these historical social dances because I learned and performed them while dancing with Westwind Folk Ensemble — our Lindy hop teacher/choreographer was a student of Frankie Manning, so I can say I'm only two steps away from the source (I also learned a great deal about traditional jazz dance from some invaluable workshops with Karen Hubbard of the University of North Carolina at a couple of NDEO conferences).
Conflicted as I have been about finishing the semester with only two choreography projects under our belts, it has actually been a very joyful week in my class (especially considering the typical stresses of the week before final exams). These kids are hungry to learn dance steps and sequences, and have been practicing them with great enthusiasm. At our last session on Friday in my 5th period class, after running through all the dances once I asked the class "we have time to run one again, which shall we do?" They all yelled eagerly "Lindy hop!" So we ran it again, and they immediately asked "can we do it one more time?" "Well, it's a two-and-a-half minute dance and we have two minutes until time to pack up and get dressed, but... Okay!" Lindy hop fiends — It's a joy to watch them dance!
1. Basic jazz — the vocabulary of jazz squares, pivots, pas de bourées, and kick ball-changes that are the standard building blocks of so much musical theater choreography. I like to set my jazz dances to classic Motown; this year it is Marvin Gaye's version of "I Heard it Through the Grapevine" (a bit of a dance joke, since our first step is a grapevine).
2. Michael Jackson's Thriller, which we performed at Hallowe'en — and which I keep reminding them is a jazz dance, choreographed in Fosse style.
3. Hip hop — I always tell students I don't teach much hip hop per se, even though they all want to learn it, because "you know more than I do"; but I did reconstruct a one-minute bit of choreography from one of EOSA's dance festival pieces, which we worked on for a week.
4. Last but certainly not least, Lindy hop and Big Apple, which we worked on just before the break. I am particularly fond of these historical social dances because I learned and performed them while dancing with Westwind Folk Ensemble — our Lindy hop teacher/choreographer was a student of Frankie Manning, so I can say I'm only two steps away from the source (I also learned a great deal about traditional jazz dance from some invaluable workshops with Karen Hubbard of the University of North Carolina at a couple of NDEO conferences).
Conflicted as I have been about finishing the semester with only two choreography projects under our belts, it has actually been a very joyful week in my class (especially considering the typical stresses of the week before final exams). These kids are hungry to learn dance steps and sequences, and have been practicing them with great enthusiasm. At our last session on Friday in my 5th period class, after running through all the dances once I asked the class "we have time to run one again, which shall we do?" They all yelled eagerly "Lindy hop!" So we ran it again, and they immediately asked "can we do it one more time?" "Well, it's a two-and-a-half minute dance and we have two minutes until time to pack up and get dressed, but... Okay!" Lindy hop fiends — It's a joy to watch them dance!
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