Dance Lesson Plan
By Ginger Lidemark
2017
Aboriginal connections with dance, culture, rules and structures.
Students can learn about the residential schools and explore movements related to rules and structures.
Big Ideas:
- Dance is informed by local history, culture, community and value systems.
- The educated dancer thinks critically, exchanges ideas and works cooperatively and collaboratively.
Content:
- Elements of body, space, time, dynamics relationships.
- The interplay of movement, sound, image and form to convey meaning in dance.
- Traditional and contemporary Aboriginal worldviews cross-cultural perspectives commutated through movement and dance
- Personal and social responsibility associated with creating, performing and responding to dance, including movement, music, thematic and costume choices.
Curricular Competencies:
Exploring and Creating
Experiment with dance elements, principles, techniques, vocabulary, and symbols to create original movement phrases
Perform simple and complex movement phrases in large-group, small group, and solo contexts
Reasoning and Reflecting
Apply thinking skills (creative, critical and reflective) in the design, creation, and refinement of movement and dance composition
Communicating and Documenting
Use dance to communicate and respond to local, regional, and national issues
Express personal voice, cultural identity, perspectives, values, and emotions through dance
Connecting and Expanding
Use critical thinking and problem solving skills to inspire innovation
Explore Aboriginal perspectives and knowledge, other ways of knowing, and local cultural knowledge to gain understanding through movement and dance
Make connections through dance to local, regional and national issues
Objectives for the Lesson:
Students will:
Learn about the purpose of structures and role of structures in life.
They will collaboratively create a short movement phrase that expresses ideas relating Aboriginal Issuesin particular the Residential schools. Students will explore rules and structures within their own life and restrictive rules paralleled with the residential schools.
Equipment:
-Attached document of Rules and Structures in My Life
-Music player and music
-Projector or video output
-short video clip of the residential schools “We were children trailer”,
Warming Up:
-Lead your usual warm up in the technique you are focusing on, leave about 45-50 minutes for exploring, creating and presenting.
-You can add limitation to the warm up:for example: not using one arm for 5 min of the warm up or keeping one leg connected to the floor, or doing the warm up on the floor.
-5 min Circle discussion of the limitation. What did the limitation feel like?
- Introduce the Concept: (5-10 minutes)
-Talk about rules, structures and limitations. What structures are apparent in life? What rules are in life? What limits are in a student’s life? What are restrictive rules? What does this do?
-Aboriginal culture: What structures were in place in residential schools? Do you know about residential schools?
-Show short video clip of the residential schools “We were children trailer”,
-Write down all the similarities and differences between structures and rules in life and the residential schools. See attached document “Rules and Structures in My LIfe”.
- Exploring the Concept: Creating movement from words and dance elements (5 minutes)
Discuss literal versus abstract. What is a literal movement? What is an abstract movement? (Literal movements are obvious such as a gesture that is the movement, abstract can have a feeling of the word but does not say what the meaning is. Example: making a heart with your hands to describe love versus a movement like a turn with the arms in the air which could mean a variety of meanings. This could be a lesson as well)
-In small groups of 3-4 students. Write down as many words as they can that have to do with structures and rules. Any words that come in mind
-Students can pair up or work alone. They are to pick 3-5 words and create abstract movements that link with the words that they use.
3. Creating: Collaborative Partners (20-30 minutes)
They can pair up and teach their partner they 3-5 movement’s to string together to create 2-4 counts of 8 movement phrase.
-Add a limitation to their sequence. Such as only right hand movements or the students must connect with each other the whole time.
4. Cooling Down: (10-15 minutes)
-Sharing: Students show their phrases. They will show their short movement phrase. (Half the class can sit and watch and two groups perform their movement) or each group can perform alone depending on the class.
Extension: Have the students teach their movement combo to the class. Pick a music, poetry or sound score and arrange the dancers in a formation. Have the students perform the movements as a performance.
Extension: Discussion of the opposite of Rules and Structures and discuss choice and freedom.
-Reflections: Have students write about what they learned and how they found the process.