Courtney's Dance/Drama Blog

Week 5!!! My Presentation Week!!! My group decided to do a cross-curricular lesson between drama and social studies, specifically Totem Poles!  Totem Poles. (Google Images) The Drama Strategies/Conventions Used In Our Presentation Include: Tableaux - Tableaux is a still image that can be created individually or in a group to portray any given subject matter. Students will use tableau’s to present their ‘family’s’ totem poles to their peers. Students will pose in a position that best represents the animal they identify with, while taking into consideration their body position, levels, facial expressions, thoughts and feelings. They will hold this position until all students have added their lines in the thought-tapping activity. Thought-tapping - Thought-tapping is used to bring the inner thoughts of characters out to the audience during a frozen/ still image. Thought-tapping will be used in this activity to bring to life the characters/ animals that each stud...

This Week was all about my group's presentation! We decided to do a cross-curricular lesson with dance and the language arts, specifically poetry. The choreographic form of dance that we focused on was Narrative and the two elements of dance were Body and Space. Narrative - A choreographic form that follows a storyline, often conveys a specific message, and usually includes an introduction, rising action, a climax, and a resolution. We will be using this choreographic form of dance to tell the story of various emotion poems that students will create and represent through dance. Body: Students will be encouraged to discover their own way of moving and body awareness. Students will be asked to use different body parts, levels, sizes or directions for each line of the poem. They can even substitute specific actions words within the poem for a body movement. Students will be using their body to evoke the feeling and look of various emotions. Space : Students will explor...

This week we opened with another improv activity. We were asked to sit in a circle together and create a story. Each person said a sentence that would add to the story. However, to make this more interesting each sentence had to start following the alphabet. For example the first person starting the story had to create a sentence starting with A, the next persons sentence starts with B, C, and so on. This activity was a lot of fun because it put people on the spot as well as allowed individuals creativity to come out. ABC. (Google Images) The second activity that we looked at in this class was titled, Roll on the Wall . For this activity we were paired up in 2s, given a blank piece of paper and tasked with drawing an outline of a person on the paper. On the inside of our drawing you record how you would feel/think about the other people. On the outside you record how you think they see you. This activity was done using the grade 5 social studies curriculum, comparing First Nat...

After coming back from 6 weeks of placement, there are only 3 weeks left of school! YAYYY!!! This week in dance there were some major Conventions/Strategies/Forms of Dance  present in our activities. They included: Narrative - A choreographic form that follows a storyline, often conveys a specific message, and usually includes an introduction, rising action, a climax, and a resolution. Unison – All dancers moving at the same time and performing the same movements. Mirroring – Partners face each other and decide who will be the first leader. The leader will begin to perform slow movements with different body parts while his/her partner follows along. The goal is to have both partners moving at (almost) the same tim e. Our first presentation combined dance with a science lesson about ecosystems/biology. Our intro activity had jungle music playing and everyone dancing around as the animal that was present on the screen. We were asked, how would that animal move in a ...