Virtual Dance Festival 2021
Developing your ideas
Once you have chosen your ideas for the ‘OUR EARTH’ themed-dance, you will need to consider HOW to develop them and turn them into a dance piece. It would be great to involve the children as much as possible in this process to give them ownership of the project.
Whenever I start planning my dance sessions, I always follow this process…
Brainstorm the topic
- Write down as many of the words and associations I have with the topic, whatever comes to mind
Add dance and movement ideas
- Look back through the brainstorm and start to pull out movement ideas – what actions could you do for some of the words? What qualities or images do they evoke?
Creative exploration
- Use these to create some tasks to try out with the kids
Reflect afterwards
- What did they enjoy doing / you enjoy watching? What could you change or improve?
To help you with developing your ideas, you have been given special FREE access to Session 1 of our ‘Primary School INSET’ training package, which can be accessed by clicking the image below…
Of course, there is no ONE way to teach dance, so please feel free to develop your ideas based on the theme ‘OUR EARTH’ in any way you feel is suitable!
Turning these explorations into a ‘dance piece’
- Choose which of the dance ideas will go into the dance piece
- Use these ideas to create a few different sections of dance
- Choose an order for the dance material – is there a logical order they need to go in? Or can they follow in any sequence?
- Decide if there are any group work opportunities / duets / solos to include. Or will everything be done together as one big group?
Final preparations
You’ve done it, you’ve created your dance piece well done! Before you film it you might want to do some of the following…
- Rehearse the dance to build confidence and movement memory. Whilst practicing, emphasise that we’ll be looking for ENERGY, CONFIDENCE and FOCUS. Check out our blog post here for some interesting ways to rehearse, whilst keeping the content fresh and avoiding the children getting bored
- Costumes. You many want to consider clothing for the dancers – will they be in their PE kits? Is there a specific colour you’d like them to wear? There’s absolutely NO obligation to costume your dancers (remember the judging panel will be looking at the quality of the dancing) but you might decide to add costumes to help the children express their ideas and bring any characters to life.