Project Proposal
Since I am very interested in dance and I want to pursue it later on in my life I wanted to base my senior project around the idea of growth in dance. People who start off in a studio based idea around dance and enter Junior High are very different than those who manifest dance when they enter more of a professional realm starting with High School. My question in this case is how would a Junior High Dance Company/Class compare to a High school/class.
My Plan
I choreographed a quick little floor movement combo that both Jr high and High school students would be able to do, it wasn't very easy nor was it very hard it was just a simple movement that everyone could comprehend. For people to get a taste of dance outside of their studio realm they have to realize that once you enter that professional world of dance it is more common to be doing contemporary/modern as a dance profession and not many people would want to see the same leaps and turns you can do, unless you plan on Majoring in something other than Modern dance like Ballet or World Dance but not even those are the same as what kids think dance is today. I taught them the combo using a very popular song called "Shake it out" by Florence and the Machine. Once students were comfortable with the song and movement I decided to switch it up and change the song entirely to a more "Modern" song. I used "Said and Done" by Nils Frahm as the next song and told the students to not worry about counts, face different directions and go on your own timing. The result of it was so amazing, everyone was so beautiful with movement and distorting my own movement that I had given them into something more amazing! I saw a lot of repetition and movement in space and that was my goal; to get them out of that comfort zone and not worrying about being technical.
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Research
Q&A/ Results
Once I had ran the combo a few times and changed the song with a wrap up I wanted to give the students a little more of a Q&A and to find out in a way of directly not asking them, What dance means to them. Dance to me is being able to move through space using ways to manipulate the human body into things it normally doesn't do, some of the kids I talked to could relate to me as where others who were more close minded when it came to that style of dance preferred Jazz/ Hip hop. When asked why they preferred the more upbeat song rather than the weird modern song they said it was because it felt more right. I noticed that as humans we are given this human mindset that we are to dance to counts and music with words where as if you give that person the freedom their mind completely shuts down and it is hard for them to suddenly move anymore.