I Am Grateful for Dance

Thornton Academy Dance program

The dance education program at Thornton Academy is well established and meeting the needs of all learners who are deeply engaged in their learning. Thornton Dance educator and Maine Arts Leadership Initiative Teacher Leader Emma Campbell has high expectations and understands how to connect with all students.

Every year Emma has students respond to the question – What am I grateful for? In a non-Covid year student responses write their gratitude notes on giant cut out leaves and tape them to the mirror in the dance studio.

This year the assignment was adapted to replicate while students are at home this year. They use the Google app called jam board to draft the notes. So everyone contributes a sticky note and then they get to pick from that as groups of that makes sense. Students use this format so there was no need to learn a new concept for the project.

Emma splits the group into breakout rooms to brainstorm thoughts and ideas and recorded one voice from each group and sent Emma the recording. She screen recorded them saying the phrase. Emma takes the footage and voices and does the editing and uploaded it to YouTube. The results are below. A wonderful way to incorporate dance into student thoughts and the outcome is amazing! Thank you Emma and Thornton Academy dancers for sharing your love for dancing and your gratefulness during this season.

In Today’s News

Hike Through History with Kate and Kris

I love it when I hear about teachers who are collaborating to provide learning that involves multiple grade levels. Most schools are divided by grade or age level yet in life – family, church, community groups – people are almost always together with all ages.

When Maine Arts Leadership Initiative Teacher Leaders Kate Smith and Kris Bisson were planning curriculum together for the annual Hike Through History for their students, I wasn’t surprised when they told me about their ideas to connect their students through dance. Kris teaches at Marshwood Middle School and Kate teaches at Central School – both are part of MSAD35, South Berwick.

Today’s news article, which includes video footage, is from seacoastonline.com and documents a unit that has been going on for a very long time in the district. In fact, this year Hike Through History turns 25!

From the article

Music and choral teacher Kris Bisson said, “Kate Smith and I designed a curriculum about music and its link to colonial times. So our focus is about dances then and now; it wasn’t just a source of physical enjoyment, but also a chance to be with your neighbors and your town community.”

On the lawn of Central School, eighth-graders worked recently with second-grade students showing them folk dances people did in the early 1800s as music sifted through the air. The dances they have chosen are authentic, matching how people actually danced in Colonial days in South Berwick and surrounding towns. One person called out the dance on a microphone. “Heel and toe, heal and toe, slide, swing your partner!” The eighth-grade students decided to plan this year’s hike around a wedding ceremony so they could show children the old-time dances as well as a few modern dances to demonstrate similarities from the past to the present. The Heal and Toe Polka, Chimes of Dunkirk, the Twist or the Macarena all have commonalities.

You can read the entire article AND see video footage of a rehearsal. It is so fun to watch!

Dancing Can Reverse Signs of Aging

Frontiers in Human Neuroscience

The excerpt from a new study, published in the open-access journal Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, shows that older people who routinely partake in physical exercise can reverse the signs of aging in the brain, and dancing has the most profound effect.

“Exercise has the beneficial effect of slowing down or even counteracting age-related decline in mental and physical capacity,” says Dr Kathrin Rehfeld, lead author of the study, based at the German center for Neurodegenerative Diseases, Magdeburg, Germany. “In this study, we show that two different types of physical exercise (dancing and endurance training) both increase the area of the brain that declines with age. In comparison, it was only dancing that lead to noticeable behavioral changes in terms of improved balance.”

You can read the entire article by CLICKING HERE.

Dance Moving

Watching dance move forward

During the last three days the blog posts have been about the dance education residency that happened during December 2016 in MSAD #33.  The “Hopes for the Future” funding came about thanks to the Thornton Academy dance program and seven dance programs in southern Maine. Almost $3,000 was awarded to MSAD #33 in Aroostook county where students in K-12 benefited from the expertise of a teaching dance artist. This year over $3,500 was raised by this same group of programs at a performance at Thornton Academy.

Next month another school will be having a performance and contributing the funds to the “Hopes for the Future” to provide dance education grants to other schools/districts. The Maine Arts Commission (MAC)will administer this grant. Please watch for the information on this blog and the weekly MAC arts ed list-serv.

Photo from the NEFA site. Click on the tag line below for the information.

The information below is from the New England Foundation for the Arts and is about how dance is moving forward.

In November 2016, New England Foundation for the Arts (NEFA) released a report by Metris Arts Consulting, entitled Moving Dance Forward: NEFA’s National Dance Project at 20 & Critical Field Trends. The report is located at http://www.nefa.org/moving-dance-forward.

The report is a comprehensive evaluation of the National Dance Project, incorporating new research about current needs of the dance field on the occasion of the 20th anniversary of the program.

Major findings and trends of significance to the field include:

• NDP’s intertwined support for creation and touring has provided robust and sustained support in an environment of increasing resource scarcity and rising costs; investing in artists to make work is regarded as the highest priority for the program.
• Dance presenters credit NDP support with improving their reputation locally, their knowledge of dance, and enabling them to take risks by introducing new artists to their audiences.
• Data reveals NDP has consistently supported artists of color, but focus group findings speak to continued systemic inequities that exclude some artists and ways NEFA and other grantmakers can further equitable and inclusive grant-making.
• Artists tour to an average of six communities for each five-year period of NDP’s grantmaking from 1996-2016, revealing that tour subsidies are a high-impact bulwark to a field-wide decline in touring opportunities over the past two decades.
• Touring is no longer motivated by economic considerations; instead, artists are primarily motivated to tour to connect with new audiences, and organizations cite mission-based commitments and dance’s ability to connect audiences to diverse cultures and ideas.
• Artists and organizations value community engagement as an important component of touring and foresee deepening this practice over the next five to ten years.

The full report may be found online at www.nefa.org/moving-dance-forward.

Happy Dance

Project in dance

Lubec teachers and Washington Academy (WA) collaborated to dance for a surprise school wide assembly. The surprise was complete with gleeful clapping, hoots and wows  from the student population. Their performance was followed by Gaetani leading the entire PK-8 school in 4 line dances. Connie Bagley is Lubec’s Art Teacher and gifted and talented Coordinator. She led Lubec’s staff in learning a line dance to “Happy Song” by Pharrell Williams. WA Dance “Guru” Gina Gaetani helped Bagley with choreography and had come to Lubec with her WA dance students to help teach the Lubec staff and then again to dance with them.

Bagley says the point of the Dance Project was to model creativity, arts integration and open mindset. Her idea to create Professional Development for teachers was for “Brains on Fire”  a graduate class she is taking with Catherine Ring and the New England Institute for Teacher Education. Here is the public link  https://prezi.com/dashboard/  to a Prezi she presented to teachers under her name Connie Harter-Bagley and is titled “Gifted and Talented Lubec”.  Connie has a dozen Art related Prezis to share.

Thank you Connie for providing this blog post that provides food for thought for other educators.

A Dancer’s Shell

Creating a shell

This video called A Dancer’s Shell created by choreographer Harry Shum, Jr. is an interesting depiction of a feeling or point in time or a place that exists for many. Mr. Shum is one of the stars of the television show Glee. Learn about Harry…

Dance! CRMS

Camden-Rockport Middle School Dance and Social Studies

National Hispanic Heritage Month is celebrated from September 15 to October 15 in the United States. It celebrates the Latino citizens of the United States and where they came from.  The Camden-Rockport Middle School holds an assembly in mid-October for this celebration.

Under the auspices of a Bisbee Grant, Erma Colvin, a Maine-based dance educator works with all the 8th Grade Spanish students in teaching them dances from Hispanic countries. They spend three weeks in the fall preparing for a school-wide assembly. This year dances from Columbia, Mexico, Spain and Argentina were taught.

Part of the grant stipulated that the dances be taught in Spanish. This was accomplished with the help of Aaron Henderson, the 8th Grade Spanish teacher at CRMS and Nohora Estes, a native Spanish speaker who teaches Spanish at the Riley School in Glen Cove. She worked with Erma and Aaron on dance vocabulary to teach the students. Participation in the dances was part of the students grade requirement. Authentic costumes were created. The CRMS Tech Club provided technical assistance in setting up the performance space.

Thank you to Erma Colvin for providing this post.

Building Community Through the Arts

English and Science Classes at Bangor High School and Brewer High School Create Original Dance and Drama

Four academic classes from Brewer High School and Bangor High School have been working on original dance and drama pieces for the past several weeks, and will be performing them for the public on Wednesday, November 20 in Orono. The students’ creative work is part of “Building Community Through the Arts,” a program organized annually at these schools by the Maine Alliance for Arts & Education (MAAE). The artist residency program, now in its fourteenth year, brings professional Maine choreographers and playwrights into academic secondary school classrooms to help students create group works which combine curriculum themes with the social issues the students themselves choose to address.

At Bangor High School this year Susannah Owen’s sophomore English class has been creating a dance piece based on its reading of Steinbeck’s “Of Mice and Men,” and Michele Benoit’s Introductory Chemistry class is creating a dance based on the behavior of elements. Both classes are working with Maine choreographer Katenia Keller.

At Brewer High School Michelle MacDonald’s two creative writing classes are creating works of drama with Maine playwright/ director Jeri Pitcher. For most of the students this is their first experience in creative theater and dance.

The public is invited to view the performances, which will take place at the Church of Universal Fellowship, 82 State Street in Orono. Admission is free. “Building Community Through the Arts” is funded this year with support from the Maine Humanities Council. Performances will run from 9:30 am to 12:30 pm; for more information visit the MAAE website, www.maineartsed.org

Tap Dancer

What stage presence

You have got to take 2 minutes and 51 seconds to see this post from the Huffington Post.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/10/22/little-girl-tap-dance-broadway-baby_n_4143124.html

LED Ballroom Dresses

Brigham Young University

Engineering students from Brigham Young University, about 17 of them, worked closely with students on the dance team to design dresses that had LED lights embedded in them. Each dress included eight LED-light strips, attached to a computer chip and battery. The results, from the year long project, exemplify the great collaboration. Click here for the article and more photographs.