Time: 6-8 weeks
This unit focuses on how choreographers organize their movement ideas into a form. Random movement is meaningless unless it is given form. In this unit, at every grade, students focus on the decision making that choreographers engage in when sequencing movements to create dances. Students learn about and explore various forms or structures used in dance.
Sample Topic: "Canon"
Suggested Resources:
Starter List of Activities
1. Introductory Activities
Discuss canon in music as being a composition or passage in which a melody is imitated by one or more instruments or voices at fixed intervals of time. A round is an example of a choral canon. In dance, canon is repeating the same movement at different times.
Sing songs such as “Row, Row, Row Your Boat” in a round.
Divide the class in half and watch each other do the wave. Tell students the wave is like a canon in dance. Try it with concepts such as light and strong, fast and slow, sudden and sustained. Discuss the quality and effectiveness of each canon.
Try doing the wave with different body parts or the whole body.
In groups, come up with as many variations of the wave as possible.
Sit in a large circle or in groups of smaller circles and pass a word around. One student can start the chain by turning to the person beside him or her and saying, “Go”. The next student will pass the word on until it gets back to the beginning. Students can experiment using different words and voice inflections and then begin to add movements. The rounds of voice and movements can gradually speed up or slow down.
Have students practise sending a canon around their entire body (e.g., right arm to head to left arm to left leg to right leg).
Watch a few video segments of the percussion group Stomp (e.g., Stomp Out Loud ) to see how they use canon. How does the quality of movement change when they go from fast to slow canon? Note the variety of innovative ways the group creates rhythms and canons of movement and sound.
2. Main Activities
Teach or have a student demonstrate a short phrase. Ask students to form groups and practise the phrase using canon form. Then, have them manipulate and explore the dance phrase to make it uniquely their own. They could use extremes of fast-slow, soft-strong, or small-big or do the phrase in the opposite direction. Ask the groups to perform the new phrases in canon form and share with the rest of the class.
Have students create a short narrative (i.e., a few sentences to tell a story with a beginning, middle, and end). Have students read the narration while posing their bodies one at a time to represent the character, action, emotion, or mood. The student who poses first can run to the end of the line to continue the story and so on. Divide the students into groups to create short narrative dances based on own topics of interest. Share the dances with the rest of the class. Have viewers try to determine what narrative ideas may have inspired the dance.
Divide the class into groups and give each person an object (e.g., pen, can, stick). Ensure that all students in the same group have the same object. Have each group create a unique rhythm with its objects. Next, challenge the students to create movements to accompany the rhythms, using a canon form. To add structure, the teacher may want to specify certain dance elements to incorporate such as actions and space. One example might be that each dance must have two actions repeated, use three levels, and two floor patterns. In the end, students will have created a canon dance and music to accompany it.
After some improvisation with canon, ask students to choose one movement phrase to practise. In groups, challenge them to create a dance using only the one movement phrase. To provide variety in the dance, have the students manipulate the phrase's dynamics (e.g., speed), space used, and relationships, one at a time. The final dance will consist of the same phrase repeated four times. The first time, the phrase will appear as it was originally designed. The second time, the phrase will have changed dynamics. The third time, the phrase will have changed space. And finally, the phrase will demonstrate changed relationships.
Guide the students to explore and practise collapsing, swinging, and falling. Create a dance using these movements as the basis.
Using improvisation, explore canon individually. Then, explore the concept in partners followed by groups of four. When students are working in groups of four, have them create a dance selecting from among the movements they have explored previously.
Draw a shape on a long sheet of paper. Let groups of students take turns adding a shape to create a line of eight or nine shapes. Some of the shapes can be repeated. Ask each group to recreate its shape with their bodies, one group following the other, in the order that they appear on the paper. Then, have everyone do all the shapes in an ordered canon sequence. Guide the students by accompanying them on a percussion instrument and signalling each group when to begin. For example, when group one begins the second shape, group two starts the first shape, as if singing a music round. Group three will begin the first shape when group two begins its second shape, and so on. Repeat the sequence focusing on transitions. Add levels and vary dynamics. Use this same idea as a starting point for small groups to create their own canon dances.
3. Concluding Activities
Encourage students to observe patterns in nature and art works. Ask students to notice how the patterns of shapes and colours can create a sense of movement for the eye to follow. Create visual art works to represent the concept of canon by using patterns or repeated images.
Have students write about their experiences in dance making, comparing their experiences of working alone, in pairs, and small groups. Did they get to use their ideas? Did they have to leave some favourites behind? How did students compromise?
Research the Stomp percussion ensemble. Find out about the various components that go into a production (e.g., music, dance, and theatre) and discuss what inspires the group.
Perform the students' canon dances at school, community centres, or for charity.
Sample Topic: "Narrative"
Suggested Resources:
Starter List of Activities
1. Introductory Activities
Discuss the meaning of the word “narrative”. Read excerpts from stories that describe different characters and brainstorm ways that the characters might move based on evidence from the narrative. For example, choose giants, superheroes, thieves, pirates, wicked wizards, and other characters of interest to grade four students. Would the characters have good posture or alignment? Would they move with swift small steps, take large lumbering steps, clomp their feet, swagger, creep, hunch over, or be a little off balance? Students may also want to clap rhythms that represent the characters' motions.
Sit in a circle and let students tell short stories or anecdotal narratives about various experiences that have happened to students; for example, being startled by an animal on a walk through a park, getting lost, or being excited by a ride at the exhibition. Divide the story into three or four sections and create one shape to represent each section of the story. Discuss how the shapes reflect each student's narrative.
Have students move freely, focusing on the continuums of fast to slow, short to long, strong to light, bound to free. Create different pathways on the floor and in the air leading with different body parts. Guide students as they practise the concepts of swinging, falling, and collapsing with individual body parts, gradually moving to the entire body. In pairs, try variations of these previous movement explorations in sequences to a count of eight. Discuss what kind of images each movement sequence implies. Join the pairs into groups of four and have each pair create a short narrative to accompany the movement sequence of its partner pair.
2. Main Activities
Teach the concept of a line dance, which is a one-line movement pattern that ends with dancers making a quarter turn to the right and repeating the dance in the new direction.
Read a short story with at least four characters, and have students create a four or eight count phrase for each of the four characters. Prompt students' imaginations and movement explorations with questions such as, “If the character is shy, how might he move? If the character is brave or reckless, how might she move?” Link the four phrases together to represent the repeated lines in a line dance. Finish with a 16 or 32 count sequence to be repeated four times in a square. Set the dance to music with a count of eight for each phrase. The dance will be similar to a line dance, representing all four characters in the story.
Put various objects into a bag. Have students pull objects out one at a time and create a narrative, gradually incorporating all of the objects. Once the story is finished, break into groups and have each group create a dance to retell the story using movement. To discourage students miming everyday gestures to retell the story and to encourage the use of more abstract expressive dance, break the story into sections. Then, take each section and identify the central idea students are trying to convey in that part of the story. Write a few words on a piece of chart paper that describe the central idea of that section. For example, a mysterious stranger arrives in the town. Guide students to fully explore the expressive potential of that statement through movement exploration of the dance elements. Refer to Grade 4 Appendix: Introducing the Dance Elements. Watch each group's dance and note the different ways the same story can be told.
Learn the stories of major ballets and divide them into sections. Have one group make a short dance to represent each section. Use Planning for Students' Dance Making as a guide.
Have students write a true narrative about some part of their lives and then create it through movement; for example, moving to a new school or winning an important soccer game. Students may choose to incorporate some words or phrases in the dance. After each student shows his/her story, have the rest of the class try to guess what happened. How did the students communicate their message (e.g., shapes, elements, patterns used, and other features of the dance)?
Read Cloud Dance and use it as inspiration for a class dance. Ask students to tell all they know about clouds. Think about the shapes, levels, and colours of different clouds. Talk about weather associated with different types of clouds (e.g., snow, rain, thunder, and wind). Discuss how different clouds move (e.g., floating, racing, tumbling, and churning). Have the students practise making shapes and movements that represent clouds. Create some short movement phrases and pick a few to sequence into a dance to be performed while someone narrates the story.
Read Nanabosho Dances by Joe McLellan. Help the students retell the legend of how the hoop dance started, using their own bodies to recreate the story. Invite a First Nations hoop dancer to demonstrate some elements of the hoop dance.
Read a story and have students pick their favourite character. Have them create a dance based on the character. Set specific criteria such as including collapsing, swinging, and falling movements and a clear beginning, middle, and end.
Students can tell the story of their day through movement:
Watch the line dances and ask students to guess which characters match with which eight counts of music. Discuss why the students chose the movements.
From the Multicultural Folk Dance Treasure Chest , watch a few dances that tell a story (e.g., Hawaii, Japan). Discuss how the dancers told their stories in comparison to how the students told theirs. What is the cultural significance? Find out if there is anyone dancing these or other heritage dances in your area, and try to arrange a visit and/or performance. Ask the visitors if there are stories associated with visitors' heritage dances.
In small groups, create photographic narratives or PowerPoint presentations depicting a day in the life of a student in their community. Project the images on a wall or screen while students perform a “Day-in-the-Life” dance.
Write a narrative journal entry to describe the experiences of any of the dance-making explorations.
Read excerpts from Tales from the Ballet or watch part of a ballet production, and discuss how the dancers portrayed the narrative. Teachers could use the “Nutcracker,” Swan Lake,” or “Petrushka.”
Draw or paint a picture of the story the students used as inspiration for their dance making.