Creative Dance Residencies provide students with a high quality dance education experience grounded in embodied exploration, cooperative dancemaking, problem solving, and reflection.  Residencies are designed to address school and classroom objectives and can culminate in open classes, informal performances, and participation in school-wide performance events.  Examples of potential residencies are below.  Our team will work with your school to create a rich learning experience for all students.

(Pre-K to Grade 2) focuses on foundational knowledge including personal space, gross motor skills, and the elements of dance.  Play-based activities such as The Magic Bubble, Let's Be, and Happy Land/Sad Land provide accessible entry points to dance concepts.  Program duration should be a minimum of 1 class/week for 10 weeks.  

(Pre-K to Grade 2)  In Dancing Feelings, children explore feelings and self-expression through movement, music, and visual arts.  They will name and embody feelings, learning how to describe the facial expressions and body language used to communicate these feelings.  A play-based experience, activities include Happy Land/Sad Land, What's Happening in this Picture? and The Feelings Museum.  Program duration should be a minimum of 1 class/week for 10 weeks.

(Grades K to 5)  This unit focuses on both dance and English Language literacy.  The unit(s) are designed around children's literature, such as Thomas Locker's Water Dance, and Oge Mora's Thank you, Omu!.  Students utilize the action and descriptive words in the literature with elements of dance such as level, pathway, and tempo to create short dance studies or Movement Sentences.  

(Grades 2 to 4)  Thomas Locker's illustrated book of water cycle poems, Water Dance, is the inspiration for collaborative dancemaking in this lesson.  The action words from the poems are explored through teacher-guided improvisation and then selected by students to use in creating dance studies.  Students will use visual supports to notate their dances and will share their dances with the class.   

(Grades 4 to 12)  These dance units can be adapted to school curriculum needs.  Students will learn the history of jazz as an uniquely American dance genre.  With a focus on the origins in vernacular dance, rooted in African dance and music (which are the elements of jazz) including syncopation, groove, bounce, polyrhythm, and body part isolation.  Students will learn the Charleston, the first cultural dance form to fully cross over racial lines, and vernacular jazz dance steps as performed in the ballrooms of the 1920s and 30s including steps from the Lindy Hop, Shim Sham Shimmy, and The Big Apple.    

(Grades 5 to 12)  Friendship Dances asks the questions, "What is friendship?" and "Can we work together to create a dance that shares our ideas and feelings about friendship?".  This unit begins with brainstorming similes for Friendship (friendship is like...) and moves onto exploring the dance elements of relationship and space.  Phrasework created by students are used to create original dances in small collaborative groups.  Students will be provided with dancemaking templates to help choreograph their dances and will participate in peer sharing and feedback.    

(Grades 4 to 12)  In this unit ,students research and study the work of iconic 20th and 21st century choreographers such as Jose Limon, Camille Brown, Alvin Ailey, Alice Shepard, and Marisa Hamamoto.  Works are studied and compared, and the choreographic devices and dance elements used by the artists are identified.  Students then create their own work in response to these masterworks.      

Our team offers professional development workshops for teachers and administrators on how to incorporate creative movement instruction into the classroom curriculum.