Improvisation is an invaluable tool in dance and choreography. It’s wonderful for children to learn as they are naturally creating and making things up as they go along. However, teaching them to do this in a group setting, and on the spot, is a different story. The kids were constantly dancing: all the way to my class, into the room, up the stairs, to the circle, and then once there they froze like statues. To counter this issue I’ve used many different games (freeze dance with set rules of movement that are specific, etc.), but dancing alone and doing their own movement is always a challenge.
This was the hurdle I faced when working with the 1st grade at Mound in May. We were exploring force and motion. I developed a dance around the idea of what makes objects and people move. I thought that improvisation would be a perfect fit, especially as the overall theme of our final show was hip hop. Freestyle is improvisation, and it is a huge part of hip hop. However, how do you get first graders to make up their own dances? This was my challenge. I found that mirroring worked the best, and I even incorporated it into our final dance. They also enjoyed working with partners to create movement together. And just to add to the chaos, we used props to literally illustrate how objects move. Originally, I wanted to use four office chairs, but we ended using just one. The students really liked rolling across the floor in the chairs and trying different poses and movements. The chair was a cool addition to the dance. My favorite thing about working with the first grade was definitely the teaching team (Ms. Morgano and Mr. Komara). They added so much to the project. Ms. Morgano even gave me the idea to use Star Wars as additional inspiration. We ended up using music from the movie, and I even designed the costumes to look like storm troopers. There were also some brave students from each class that did solos. I was impressed by their courage.
This residency was a wonderful blend of student and teacher collaboration Best of all, though, it was fun and everyone learned from each other.
