Football World Cup – football dance

3 easy steps to create a great duet that will inspire boys to dance (and secretly love it!).

1. Football Phrase.  Discuss the different actions that footballers do eg. passing, scoring, tackling, diving, dribbling.  Ask the children to each choose 4 football actions and put them into a random order (putting them into a random order helps to abstract the movement and make it less football, and more dance).  Rehearse this football ‘phrase’ (movement sentence) several times so the children can repeat it accurately.
2. Spectator Phrase.  With a partner, create a second dance phrase, this time focusing on the football spectators – the actions they do whilst watching the match (clapping, Mexican wave, head in hands, celebrating).  Again, choose 4 actions and put them into a random order and practice several times.
3. Structure.  Put the dance together as a duet using an A / B structure.  Section A: pairs start away from each and perform their football phrase towards each other (so they finish close together).  Their football phrase will be different to their partners (so they will perform similar but not identical movements).  Section B: perform their spectator phrase together, in unison.

Ask each duet (or 3-4 duets of you have a large group) to perform to the rest of the class.  Discuss the dances afterwards – which pairs had imaginative actions as footballers, spectators?  Which pairs worked well together?

Suggested music:

• ‘Shake, Break, Bounce’ Chemical Brothers
• ‘Match of the Day’ TV theme tune
• ‘The Great Escape’ BBC Symphony Orchestra

Have great fun with this one and let me know how you get on.

Keep dancing!