Getting Started with Dance
Dance on ARTS:LIVE
These resources will help give you the confidence to teach Dance in any classroom at all year levels. Give it a go! Don't be afraid to take some creative risks. Dance is a wonderful art form that everyone can engage in. Through our bodies, movement and creativity we discover the many ways ideas can be articulated, explored and communicated. You don't need many resources to get started either.
To be able to dance, students must wear clothing that allows free movement. They need to prepare their bodies and minds for action and perform movements safely and in good alignment to avoid injury.
Warm-up
Always make sure that students warm up as cold muscles can tear easily. This focuses body and mind, and prepares us for dance.
Watch the video in the first lesson of An Introduction to Hip-Hop for some ideas.
Include physical games or focus activities that students know and like.
Follow games with 2-3 minutes of steady, controlled mobilising movements of joints such as circles of the ankles, knees, hips, spine, shoulders, elbows and wrists.
Avoid deep stretches before or during warm-up.
Dance spaces
Dance spaces should:
be clear of objects and obstacles
have floors with wooden floorboards (such as a school gymnasium) or linoleum
have sprung floors if students are jumping or turning frequently. Sprung floors absorb impact and return energy at a rate that the body can effectively use.
have smooth and uninterrupted surfaces (ie no nails or splinters)
be in a space that has no other classes or distractions
allow enough space for students to move simultaneously without touching and to travel in one direction for at least eight seconds.
Time for dance
If possible, dedicate a special time and space for dance classes. One or two regular 45-60 minute (band F-6) or 60-90 minute (band 7-10) classes of dedicated dance time a week will help students to concentrate, explore and elaborate on ideas progressively. It will free you as a teacher to side coach, keep an eye on safety and attend to students' individual needs.
Encourage play
Explore the elements of dance (time, space, dynamics and relationships) through creative play using a blend of dance, drama and music. Creative play is really improvisation - structured but student driven. Young dancers (especially F-2) need very clear structures for improvisation.
Basic principles that support students and encourage creativity include:
There is never only one way to do things.
There is no best way of improvising or creating a dance.
All responses are valid.
Keep instructions simple.
Try movement then talk about it.
Ask students for additional ideas.
Engage with dance in a variety of ways
Ensure your dance-teaching program includes the multiple ways students can engage with dance: as a creator, performer, an audience member and a critic. These are the bedrock of good dance in education practice. ARTS:LIVE provides many examples of how to apply these roles separately and how teachers might integrate them all within one lesson.
Demonstrate to inspire students
You don't need to be an accomplished dancer to teach Dance - you just need to be enthusiastic and demonstrate a willingness to support students' own explorations. If you give things a try, your students will too. Don't be afraid to show students a movement, even if it's not perfectly executed. For example, show students just how small a shape you can make and ask them if they can make a smaller shape. Show them how high, long or fast you can jump and see what they can do in response.
Use examples
There are many ways you can illustrate an idea or movement:
Use images, a video or the results of an online search for many examples of dance movement from around the globe.
Invite a special guest to your dance class to perform a dance from a different culture.
Demonstrate movement yourself or ask students to demonstrate on your behalf.
Explore ARTS:LIVE and use dance movements or sequences from one of the Dance videos to illustrate a point.
Useful teaching strategies
It is important to use a variety of teaching strategies in Dance.
Apply demonstration strategies when you wish to show a new movement.
Use command and response for quick warm-up games or to recall a set of movements.
Learn how to break movement down (progressive part strategies) so that students learn a movement slowly before adding any variations and the body has time to build it into the muscular memory.
Set tasks and allow students to explore ideas and actions.
Use students' excitement and growing expertise to develop reciprocal peer teaching and feedback.
Provide unhurried blocks of time to experience learning taking place as students improvise and generate movement. Don't rush the process - even when a final product is a long way away, students are learning at a deeply significant level.
Build in opportunities for guided discovery, for example lying on the floor and imagining all the bones of the body from the feet to the head, or describing the lightness you want students to feel when standing in good alignment.
The Dance class is often a noisy space. When creating their own phrases or dance sequences, students need to discuss and negotiate ideas.
Set up some ground rules - these won't be very different from regular classroom rules:
Establish a physical gesture or sound that students associate with stopping everything and turning their attention to you.
Make space for everyone: peripheral vision develops as children mature. Space students out so that they can move without touching anyone else.
Consider a range of different spatial arrangements: circles, lines and random locations.
Encourage and reward participation:
Don't focus only on the outcome of an activity - the process is just as important.
Notice and remark upon the uniqueness of a movement or shape, or the way individuals are working together.
Encourage additional ways to extend engagement such as "Can you do it facing in another direction" Can you perform it in canon? Can you add a jump, a fall or a hop??
Planning
Prepare for a term of dance and plan for individual lessons. Consider a theme that runs across the term or semester. This might be a driving inquiry or an area of investigation in another subject, such as the books you are reading. Consider what materials and resources you require and ensure you can get them.
Plan for reflection and evaluation. Never leave this to chance.
Preparation
Consider the space you will be dancing in. Is it safe? What needs to be altered to ensure there is enough room or to reduce distraction?
Prepare your music in advance if possible. CDs tend to skip when students dance close to them. You may prefer to create playlists on digital media.
Bring comfortable clothing for dance days.
Attend professional development where possible.
Organisation
If you have 45 minutes for a dance class, plan for 35-40 minutes as students require time to prepare, take shoes off and deposit bags. Start with a warm-up of 5-10 minutes, or longer if it's a cold day. Introduce two or three activities, allowing time for dance making and responding (verbal, drawing or writing). If using digital media ensure you have everything prepared and tested in advance.
Managing technology
Create music playlists.
Use a remote control to stop, start or mute music and sound from a distance.
Use digital devices that are easy to replay through your computer or electronic whiteboard. Many cameras simply connect to your computer via the USB port.
Consider old technology. For example, overhead projectors can be effective lighting sources.
Use technology to share dance ideas with a class in another town, state or country. Perform for them and ask them to perform a dance for your class.
Demonstrate the step or have a student show how you would like it to look.
Describe the important features of the step. Encourage students to try the step with you.
Break down the movement into its simplest form, build upon it progressively and allow plenty of time for practice.
Use a range of teaching strategies so that all students have a chance to learn using their preferred learning style.
Only teach one section at a time.
Allow the students time to practise until they are confident.
Add on the next section and continue this process until the dance is complete. Don't rush. Learning a dance may take several sessions.
Presentation
Performance is a necessary part of Dance in the Australian Curriculum: The Arts. Ensure performance opportunities are appropriate for the skills and confidence of the students. Performing should be fun, not traumatic.
At F-2 level, performance tends to be informal with students showing you and each other the movement they have made.
For older students, performance could include:
informal showings with discussion in class
invitations to other classes or to parents or guardians to view a work or practice
short performances during assembly
working with music students to create a combined event
performing at rest homes or community events.
Flash mobs are very popular at present, but you need to ensure a safe and controlled environment.
Overcoming constraints
Unable to demonstrate
Ask a student to demonstrate for you. Use carefully chosen words and imagery to evoke the quality of movement you want the students to imagine and explore.
No electronic music
Create sound with found objects (pans, pipes, shakes made from bottles and sand) or use body percussion. Invite students to help you make up rhythms they can dance to.
No dance space
Push chairs and tables to the sides of the classroom.
See if you can use the library space.
Form a partnership with the local council or businesses for free use of space in return for acknowledgement or advertising in your school newsletter.
Look online - there are many teaching resources for dance, linking inquiry units to movement ideas.
Contact Ausdance and enquire about professional development days, which will also connect you to other teachers of Dance in your state.
Tips and tricks
Counting for dance
Dancers generally count in 8s when music is in 4/4. Counting in 8s helps dancers remember longer chunks of movement. When counting in, count backwards from 5, for example: "5, 6, 7, 8".
When a piece of music is too long
Respect that music is composed by artists for particular reasons. Editing music can destroy the composer's intent and splicing it with other music can confuse dancers, especially when the beat or tempo changes. Try to select music that has a shorter duration, or use live music or percussion.
How to extend a section of movement
Extend movement sections by applying choreographic structures and formations.
Apply canon, contrast and repetition.
Slow down or speed up specific movements, changing the original quality and duration.
Travel movements in different directions.
Have one group freeze while another group performs.
Do the same movement on the floor or at another level.
Do big movements in a very small space or small movements covering a larger amount of space.
Isolate one movement and repeat it a number of times.
Links to general capabilities
Go to the Teach tab on ARTS:LIVE for information on how the activities help students develop the general capabilities from the Australian Curriculum. The Educational value statements will guide you and the Teacher Notes contain more specific guidance on how the resources relate to specific general capabilities.
Examples from ARTS:LIVE
Literacy
In dance, students use literacy skills to access knowledge, make meaning, express thoughts, emotions and ideas, interact with others and participate in a range of communication activities.
In Performance and Digital Media: Interactive Dance, students access and read online information about companies and creative processes. They document, scrutinise and communicate their own creative processes by writing journal entries, creating storyboards and applying their persuasive language skills to pitch an innovative interactive dance idea to a producer.
Numeracy
Students use spatial reasoning in dance to recognise and visualise shape, to show and describe position, pathways and movement, and to explore the effects of different angles. They use appropriate units of measurement in interpreting, designing, making and managing time and space in dance. They organise, analyse and create representations of data such as diagrams and charts.
In Sports and Performance: Fizzie Dance students generate, rehearse and perform a dance to music, and attend to musical structures and patterned counting. They create formations that involve angles and degrees, symmetry and asymmetry and use processes such as canon and repetition. They document the pathways used in the dance as dance maps.
Information and communication technology (ICT) capability
Students can use digital tools in dance to:
represent their ideas and artworks
locate, access, select and evaluate arts information and their own work
share and communicate with a variety of audiences.
Many of the dance activities on ARTS:LIVE encourage digital documentation of student-generated dance in order to play back and encourage reflection and discussion, to identify areas for future improvement or to share with the school community. Performance and Digital Media: Interactive Dance specifically explores creative relationships with digital media and offers suggestions for student activities.
Critical and creative thinking
In dance, students draw on their curiosity, imagination and thinking skills to pose questions and explore ideas, space, materials and technologies to create choreographies. They generate and analyse dance, consider possibilities and processes and make choices that assist them to express their ideas, thoughts and feelings creatively. In responding to their own choreographies and the work of others, students learn to:
analyse and identify possible meanings and connections with self and community
offer and receive effective feedback.
In Sports and Performance: Fizzie Dance, students consider the relationship between sport and dance. They generate movement based on specific sports actions and, using simple choreographic structures, reflect upon, analyse and revise their work to communicate an idea or intention.
Personal and social capability
Students develop and practise social skills when working with others in dance that assist them to communicate effectively, work collaboratively and make considered group decisions.
In Sports and Performance: Fizzie Dance, students apply teamwork and use negotiation skills as they generate, rehearse, refine and perform a dance. In Dance Your Socks Off: School of Fish, students also participate as a team in mirror activities where one student leads and another student (or group of students) closely follows.
Links to cross-curriculum priorities
The Australian Curriculum stresses the importance of the three cross-curriculum priorities in a globalised world. It embeds cross-curriculum priorities in all learning areas and encourages the explicit teaching of them whenever the opportunity arises. ARTS:LIVE Teacher Notes list any relevant cross-curriculum priorities for each activity. There are plenty of opportunities in Dance to address cross-curriculum priorities in your teaching.
Examples from ARTS:LIVE
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander histories and cultures
Asia and Australia's engagement with Asia
Performance and Digital Media: Interactive Dance gives students the option to investigate the use of light and shadow by viewing and analysing the shadow plays of Asian cultures, identifying key features such as clarity of image, character and story. They use these features to inform the development of own dances.
In Dance Your Socks Off: School of Fish teachers can extend learning by reading the myth of the koi fish and facilitating a danced re-enactment or elaboration of the koi fish's struggles to swim up a waterfall and its ultimate reward in becoming a dragon.
In School of Fish, students are introduced to ocean ecology to explore what is found in a healthy underwater environment. They also have the option to create a soundscape, using recycled materials such as pebbles, paper, or water trickling over objects.
Sustainability
In School of Fish, students are introduced to ocean ecology to explore what is found in a healthy underwater environment. They also have the option to create a soundscape, using recycled materials such as pebbles, paper, or water trickling over objects.
Glossary
Body
: the instrument for expression. Students learn about the body by exploring the creative use of body parts and body bases. They learn to care for the body by understanding and applying warm-up processes and safe dance practice.
Canon
: a movement or phrase performed by a dancer or group of dancers that is then repeated by another dancer or group of dancers. The process is repeated more than twice.
Choreography
: making decisions about what to put in a dance: which movements and when, transitions between moves, and how to arrange movement and people in the space.
Choreographic devices
: tools choreographers use to manipulate and alter movements and phrases, including canon, contrast, repetition and unison.
Contrast
: movement that is in some way different from the original. Contrast may be used to highlight some aspect of the original, eg one dancer performs fast, intricate movements while a second dancer performs stillness.
Dynamics
: an element of dance that refers to quality of action. It involves force and weight as well as movement qualities from very soft to very powerful, or from light to heavy - and more importantly, explores the qualities in between these extremes.
Elements of dance
: time, space, dynamics and relationships.
Fundamental movements
: jumping, walking, running, hopping, skipping, balance, stillness, rolling, side steps, over-arm actions.
Improvisation
: a stream-of-consciousness process performed through movement. Improvisation cannot be right or wrong. It allows us to play with an idea or movement and see where it takes us.
Physical skills
: alignment, balance, stamina, control, coordination, strength and flexibility.
Relationships
: connections occurring when the body dances. These include connections between dancers, between body parts, between the dancer and the space, and between the dancer and an audience, as well as the dance and its relationship to an idea, the music, a story etc.
Repetition
: repeating an action or phrase; repetition includes canon.
Safe dance practice
: an approach developed in Australia in the 1990s to ensure safe dance conditions in dance training and performance as well as safe methods for teaching dance.
Space
: an element of dance that includes individual body shape, group shapes, level, dimension, direction, pathways, lines of sight and formations. It can also be thought of as the space in which dance occurs as in 'the dance space' or theatre.
Technical skills
: include alignment and physical skills such as control, balance, strength, flexibility and coordination. Technical skills vary according to dance style.
Time
: an element of dance that includes beats, rhythms, accents, speed and duration.
Unison
: two or more people performing the same movement with the same speed, dimension and level of energy.
Produced by the Song Room with Ausdance Australia, Ausdance Victoria and the Australian Government Department of Education
Talent: Diana Nguyen
References
Chunky Move (2006)
Glow.
DVD. Directed by Gideon Obarzanek and Frieder Weiss, Melbourne, Victoria.