The following core tasks could provide a focus for pupils' activities in this unit.
Task 1
In groups, pupils create and perform a dance with three sections to it. Decide on how the sections fit together and ensure that a range of choreographic principles and structures are used when developing the dance. Use the following ideas as a starting point.
- Strictly ballroom
- strictly competitive: develop group phrases based on gestures, ballroom steps and patterning with a fairly serious competitive edge
- strictly comic: develop, exaggerate and extend the material to create comic duo sequences,
eg going wrong, getting tangled, falling over, robotic repetition of gestures,
losing a partner, unexpected movements, interrupting step patterns
- Utter chaos: use pupils? ideas to develop a section based on chaos and conflict
Task 2
- Chance encounters
- finding material: in small groups, each pupil writes six action words/movements on separate pieces of paper that are turned upside down and jumbled up. Each pupil takes six at random and creates a motif using those six words. Pupils then learn each other's motifs. From this material, create a dance that involves individual and/or pair and/or group sections. Develop the dance and perform it
- structuring the material: pupils make decisions about what to do through chance,
eg selecting cards from a deck, throwing dice, tossing coins, picking telephone numbers, to decide the order of movements, motifs, number of dancers, spacing, pathways, formations, etc, to structure and design the dance
- extend the material: pupils cut and splice motifs with each other to structure new material by chance
Adaptations and variations on the tasks
- make the dances or sections longer to make the task harder, or shorter to make it easier
- use fewer sections,
eg one or two, to make it easier, or more,
eg three or four, to make it harder
- allow pupils to select their own ideas and music
Other dance ideas:
- tribal dances (eg Maori haka, African)
- social dances (eg street dances, lindy hop)
- social/political issues (eg drugs, political situations, bullying)
- modern,
eg West side story
- classical,
eg Romeo and Juliet
- abstract ideas derived from painting, sculpture, etc
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