Language and Dance

As part of our class for teaching dance, we explored the opportunity for a cross-curricular connection between language and dance. The activity we did, specifically, was targeted towards grade 6 students and there is a video of our interpretation of this activity below.

Language 

This activity involves creating a dance in response to a poem. The poem we used was Christine Jackson's Departures, and it was read aloud while students perform the dance with soft music that adds to the mood of the poem. This connects to the curriculum expectation reading 1.6: extend understanding of text /ideas by connecting, comparing and contrasting the ideas in them to their own knowledge, experience, and insights, to familiar texts and to the world around them. It requires students to interpret the poem's themes and represent them in a different way. 

Dance

This activity connects to the dance curriculum expectation A1.2 use dance as a language to interpret and depict central themes in literature (e.g., develop a movement vocabulary that reinterprets themes such as good versus evil or humans versus nature; construct a dance that explores bravery in a legend or peace in a poem). 

The two elements of dance in this activity are energy and space. This refers to the heaviness/lightness of students' movements based on the poem (energy) as well as the students' decisions on how to use the space of the room based on the themes/tones of the poem. 

The choreographic form is unison. Unison refers to students performing the same movement at the same time, or, in unison. The entire dance does not need to be in unison, and selective use of unison may help with the interpretation of the poem. 

The video below was our dance creation in response to the poem Departures.  If you look closely, you can see our use of space and energy, and selective use of unison to add drama. 


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