multicultural rally

We had our second in-front-of-the-whole-school performance last Friday at the multicultural rally. This seems to be a tradition at a few of the high schools in the district, where once a year the school gets together to celebrate the multitude of different cultures on campus — at least as much as possible in a one-hour assembly. this one featured a multicultural fashion show, organized by the French Club: girls (yes, they were all girls) in traditional dress of their own or their parents' homelands (we do have a lot of 1st- and 2nd-generation immigrants) — from Persia, Punjab, Pakistan, Liberia, Laos, and the Philippines to Guatemala, El Salvador, Jamaica and Brazil... It also featured dances from the Polynesian Club as well as the dance classes.

Since I knew the Polynesian Club would be performing, I had hoped that my students might choose to perform Samba for some variety and wider cultural representation (and we do have a relatively large pocket of Brazilian-Americans on campus, who might have been pleased to see their national dance represented). But the overwhelming consensus among the student performers was for kahiko (ancient) hula — Kilauea — and the Tahitian dance Papio; and since those were the two dances that were relatively simple and the students were already confident with, it did make sense. We had 39 dancers opt to perform (our biggest group yet), most in both dances. We rehearsed exclusively during class time, within each class, but managed to pull all performers together just once, the day before the rally (this will all be easier next year when we have one specific performing class working together every day). They all remembered their places and danced very well — these students were again a pleasure to work with!

class dance project

Wow — things have gotten very busy and I haven't posted in over a month! I guess I have a bit of catching up to do...

Since completing our brief Polynesian unit with a bit of Tahitian, I gave the classes a short choreography project to create a phrase for a class dance. This is an assignment I had only given a couple of times before, and which I was a little hesitant about, as it doesn't reinforce any specific dance elements — but it does give the students a chance to create the phrases they've wanted to create since the beginning of the year (and, as I have to admit, perhaps help to get them hooked on the idea of taking Dance again next year). The idea is very simple: create a short dance phrase (24 - 32 musical beats) that you would like to teach to your classmates, which we will then combine into a class dance. The only real requirement was that the movements be the students' own creation (no direct-from-video choreography please!).

A few interesting things came up in this one for me... One was that, as I watched groups working on their steps, I noticed an awful lot of dependence on song lyrics for movement ideas — things like the ubiquitous gesture for “call me” (thumb and pinkie stretched from ear to jaw), what I think of as “Mickey Mouse-ing” the song (of course,  could have headed this off by requiring instrumental music again, but part of the impetus for this project was to let the kids work with the music and movements they’ve wanted to work on all along). One of my thoughts on this was that we had just recently learned Hawai’ian dance, in which the gestures explicitly illustrate the words of the song, and I wondered how their movements might have differed had we done this at another time; but I think in some respects this way of thinking about songs and gestures is so natural for them it may not have made a difference.

Ironically (given how hesitant I was about the assignment to begin with), this turned out to be one of our more successful choreography projects. Everyone participated, and all groups successfully taught their phrases to the class — some with their own spokesperson, some using me to transmit their steps using “loud teacher talk”... Students were eager to learn from each other, and although they did tend to be more talkative and less focused when their peers were teaching than they usually are with me, they were invariably supportive and enthusiastic about their classmates’ work — and picked it up very quickly, to boot. With a good mix of styles, tempos and energies, each class now has one more dance to add to their repertoire for the end of the year.

Before leaving for spring break, I assigned a journal reflection on the project — How did you feel about teaching your movement to the class? Did the knowledge that you would be teaching your steps change your creative process? What was hardest for you in this? How did you feel about learning movement from your classmates? Which group surprised you, and why or how? The responses were overwhelmingly positive — many students said they thought they would be too scared to teach, but they gained confidence and pride as they saw their peers learning their movement... I had originally thought of this as a project just for the first year of the program (essentially to give each class that one more repertoire piece for the end-of-the-year concert); but after seeing what  a confidence-builder it became, I think I may need to bring it back in future years — perhaps with just a few tweaks to get them over that song-lyric rut!

hula responses

Yesterday we watched a video selection on the culture and history of kahiko hula (a short segment from the immensely useful PBS series "Dancing"). Afterwards I asked students to write in their journals some observations, and to think especially about how what they have seen, heard, and learned over the past week and a half might change how they think about Hawai’ian dance. Here are a few things they said:

“I always thought Hawai’ian dance was just for fun but it’s so much more than that. It tells a story about Hawai’I and their culture.”

“I always thought hula was just dancing with your hips to beats. I never knew it told a story.”

“Before, I had thought that hula was a new, modern dance – I didn’t know it had been a dance form for years.”

“While they’re dancing, they sing the song, they do it powerfully and they sing very loud. I had thought hula was silent and graceful. Now I know it is a part of their life and very important to them.”

“I understand more about why these dances are so sacred to their culture, and why the land is so precious to them.”

“It does surprise me how most of the dances are dedicated to nature. Maybe that is why Hawai’I is so clean and beautiful.”

“I saw the dancers dancing for the volcano, I heard that when the lava dries up it creates new land. I learned that kahiko hula has valuable meaning behind the dance steps, describing nature.”

“It was sad to hear that when the missionaries came, they forced the Hawai’ian culture out and made it seem like what they knew and what their ancestors knew and believed were all bad.”

“The speaker mentioned that foreigners would come to the island and try to change the culture – they were disrespecting the ancestors by doing that because it was saying they could go to hell with their culture. Cultural oppression.”

I feel fortunate to have so many students who are so engaged with our material...

Hawai'ian hula

My classes are back from a week off for Presidents' Week (that's the official title — it's commonly known in wealthier districts as "ski week," but my students call it "sleep week"), and are continuing our spring semester trip around the world. This week we took up Hawai'ian hula — specifically 'auana (modern) hula, but we will be doing a kahiko (ancient, pre-European contact) dance next week as well.

Many of the world dance forms I teach — including Samba, Baile Folklorico, African-Haitian, and Congolese — are in the "I'm not an expert at this, but I have learned it and would like to share it with you" category... But hula is a little different: although I am still nothing like a true expert, I did perform with a halau for enough years to feel quite comfortable with the vocabulary (both physical and terminology) and to have a relatively large repertoire of dances to share.

I have a few students who have already studied various forms of Polynesian dance, at least one very seriously... When she walked into the studio Monday morning and saw the Hawai'ian vocabulary (kaholo, hela, ami, ka'o) on the board, her entire face lit up as she said "are we starting hula today?" It has been a pleasure all week to see how seriously most of my students take the form — in the first couple of days, many were already asking me if I would have vocabulary sheets to study! We did finish (though not perfect) one 'auana hula this week, Ka Uluwehi o ke kai ("the plants of the sea"); next week we will do a very short kahiko hula, Kilauea, before moving on to Tahitian.

On Thursday, we did a short reading on the history and culture of hula — just some bare-bones ideas about the pre- and post-contact eras, all that I can fit on one page — and I asked them to write in their journals something from the reading that surprised them, something they felt was significant, and something they were curious about. Again, I was gratified to see how many picked up on the concepts of hula being a form of communication and a way to hand down stories without written language, and how important hula is and has been to the indigenous culture of the islands (and how it was nearly destroyed when banned by the Europeans). I was also pleased to see the range of things students were curious about — why the songs talk about nature so much; whether the people still secretly danced while hula was banned; and "why did the queen get overthrown?" We already had some good discussions, I anticipate more when we see some video clips next week.

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)!

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!