The first
time I arrived at the local after school program in town with Celeste and two
dancers from the Dance Ensemble who were willing enough to help me carry out my
workshop with the kids. At this point, I knew I would have to be flexible with
the workshop I had prepared, which would be a simple version of Workshop #1, but
it turned out I had to do so more greatly than I had anticipated. While we had
a small, older group of students already at the site, we waited 15 minutes for
the younger group to arrive from the elementary school (and seeing as we only
had ~40 minutes to begin with, this would make quite a difference in the
structure of the workshop). When the younger students arrived, we had about 20
students to work with.
Warm-up
I deviated
from using any of the five images I had presented to the Dance Ensemble dancers
and to the kids when they visited our studio the week prior. So, instead, I
borrowed a large model of DNA that my Biology teacher used to teach my
second-year Biology class about DNA. I thought this would be a good substitute
for a simple image on a small sheet of paper, because it would allow the
students to get up close and personal with the model and see it as not only a
learning tool, but also a sculpture and something interactive.
Being in
this space did present a few more difficulties, however. It was obvious that
the students were in a space that they were familiar with and used to behaving
in a more relaxed manner, than say a classroom. Electronics, crafts, and other
activities became distractions for many students who were initially invested in
the movement workshop. It should be noted that part of the culture of the space
and program includes an emphasis on encouraging students to participate in a
variety of activities, but no child can be forced to do so. In this case, the
students could drop out of participating in the workshop if they chose. It was
a challenge to keep the students’ focus and to keep the space from erupting in
noise. In this situation, I noticed right away, that we were completely in a
different situation than the one we were in a few days earlier when the same
group of kids visited us at the college. In our dance studio, the kids were not
only contained but also in a foreign setting. They could not be distracted,
because apart from each other, there was nothing to be distracted by. They were
thrown into a situation that went at rapid speed and by the time they had to leave,
had no opportunity to engage in any type of distraction.
After
introducing ourselves and warming up by experimenting with shapes, levels,
abstract and literal ideas, we jumped into using the model to identify its
characteristics and descriptions and building a movement phrase based on these
ideas and observations.
Aside from
the slightly chaotic scene that ensued, each group came up with some fantastic
movement. There were ideas ranging from perceiving the model to be a set of
monkey bars, to stairs, to a marshmallow, to overlaying text with the movement
by naming all the colors that could be seen on the model.
The model
was an excellent tool that sparked many of the kids’ curiosity. Some students
were ambitious enough to instigate questions themselves. One even got out a pen
and pencil to investigate the model more in depth. But some of the little ones
had no idea what they were looking at. It was such a delight, in these
instances, to ask them questions to get a glimpse into how they thought of this
weird looking object. Some talked about how it looked like a spider web, in
which different things could get caught, while others explained to me how DNA
is probably the same size as the model in little kids and probably bigger in
adults. On these occasions I wonder what they will think when they learn that
DNA is used to attract and interact with enzymes, similar to the interaction
between a spider web and its prey, or how mind-blowingly large DNA is within
our cells, but in an exponentially smaller sense. By asking the right
questions, these four, five, and six-year olds were essentially coming up with
the same answers, but from a different perspective, as that of a scientist or a
biology textbook.
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