Make Every Day a Dance Day!
© Marilyn Cameron
Group leaders don't have to be trained in Dance to provide Movement workshops, because the members of your group don't need to be shown 'how' to move when they come to express themselves. They need the chance to 'free' themselves, and you can provide that simply by introducing them to the dynamics of dance.
The dynamics are the speed and pace of the movement in variation, i.e., speeding up, slowing down, and moments of stillness.
At first, the use of percussion instruments can be used to explore the dynamics. A drum for your short, sharp sounds, a cymbal or gong for longer, ringing sounds, would do. The three basic ingredients of music, time-beat, rhythm, and climax can be explored with these simple instruments. If you don't have any instruments, and upside down bin, pencils and drinking glasses, tins for shakers, jars containing lentils, peas etc, spoons beating on wooden floors, and lots of other things, make great rhythms to move to!
Your early workshops can be simple, everyone walks to the beat, with arms still, or perhaps only move the arms, gradually bringing in the movement of the different pars of the body. Working as a group your members will build up confidence from this type of early workshop. There are many outside outreach dance workers who will come in too to help you develop further if you need them.
Bring some instrumental music next time, and use it as stimuli for exploring your space and for creating mood and atmosphere. Suggest to your group that they are say, 'Russian Dolls', and that they are tightly imprisoned inside the smallest one, hardly able to move, and they must break out of it, (to the rhythm), only to discover they are still imprisoned inside the next, slightly larger doll, and so on, until they are having to 'break out' of a space wide enough to cross into each others space.
Add some variations in levels, i.e. Upper body movements, lower body movements that include lying on the floor, stretching, leaping, crouching, jumps and rolls. Adding in varying levels takes the discovery of space further, as does adding pathways, directions, for interest.
A good workshop that introduces all these elements is:- The group members take up positions, curling up as small as they can on the ground, with half of them growing from one finger until the whole body has become, a fire. The other half, at the same time, are growing from one finger until the whole body has become, a tree, moving with the wind. All of them are growing to the rhythm of the beat. The fires then move to consume the forest, which reacts in movement. The trees gradually burn down to the ground, the flames become smaller until they too are extinguished. The rhythm indicates, time-beat, rhtym, climax, time-beat, stop.
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