collaboratively creating dance

Are there dance moves that look any cooler than hip hop? I don't think so. I was introduced to rap several years ago by a grade five student in my classroom. She invited me to come to a performance and I was blown away. The way that hip hop dancers isolate their muscles and pop and move like robots, well it's something that I just can't do.

A few years later I found myself teaching at Georges Vanier Fine Arts School. There I had the good fortune to work with professional artist, and dance instructor Mike Mirlin. At the time I had a classroom full of cool jocks. The kind of kids that you could easily assume would be afraid to dance in front of their peers and their refusal to participate would make it difficult for others to feel secure enough to try. Well that was not the case. It was Mike's first year at Vanier and after showing the kids a few cool hip hop moves, the kids were enthralled.

During my time at Vanier, I underestimated the value or the importance of dance. I failed to properly recognize what it was doing for our students. I didn't see it until I moved to St. Anne School. When it comes to performing: dancing, acting, giving a book talk, or describing what you've learned, the Vanier kids just had so much more natural confidence. They were used to performing. Every time that you get up to present something to a group - it is a performance and a huge personal risk. Kids know this.

At St. Anne School, our kids are routinely asked to demonstrate their learning for others. Over the course of a year, I can see that the kids get more comfortable with speaking in front of others. Seriously though, there is nothing that creates more confidence in yourself than successfully performing a dance, a play, or a song in front of others.

Think back to your most confident fantasy as a middle years student. What was it? You were a rock star singing on stage for your school. That imaginary performance let your peers see just how cool you really were, right? Well, maybe it was just me.

Last year we had Amanda Murray come and instruct our students for one day during our TreatySmarts project. She was so cool that even my "coolest" or most frightened student was trying to follow her lead. It was not really what I expected. I wished that we had had more money and time to have her work more with our kids.

For our ArtsSmarts grant project this year, we are working with Mike Mirlin. I wanted Mike to work with us because I knew he was a strong instructor and that it would be good for our students to see that dancing is not just for girls, but for strong confident men as well.

Mike started to teach the students a small robotic dance number on the very first day. We crammed all 32 kids into the band room, which was not nearly enough space, and he showed them what they would work on. I can't adequately explain how cool this dance was, but Mike looked like a machine. His body had stopping points, like it had hinges. If you don't think that's difficult, stop reading, run to a  mirror and try it. It's hard.Without exception, every kid wanted to learn how to move like that. By the end of the hour, the dance was learned and I got to watch as 33 people moved like robots to the music. It gave me shivers. I was thrilled for my students.

In the next few sessions, Mike instructed all students. It was apparent to anyone working with us, that the kids were pumped. We heard from several students that they were practising at home or getting together to practice with each other. For those of you who work with kids, it's a pretty good sign that they interested in a subject when they go home and do the work on their own. For me this was like a hole in one!

After a few weeks, we had to ask students to choose which discipline they wanted to work in: dance or music/spoken word/rap. Many students were conflicted. They wanted to do both, which was something that I didn't really expect.

I have to diverge here and say that our original plan was to have kids choose one form of art: graffiti art, dance, or music/spoken work /rap. A wrench was thrown into our plan when Pavlo received his residency rotation schedule and we realized that all of the work he was going to do with our students had to be completed after school and in the evening. To adapt to his schedule, we only gave the students two choices: dance or music/spoken word/rap. This was a relief to many students who wanted to be involved with the mural and do one of the other genres.

When you plan an activity of this nature, you always expect that someone will shy away from all aspects of art. I had a few kids in mind that I thought we might be able to have work as light and sound technicians and behind-the-scenes people. When choices were all made, there was no one left over who hadn't decided what they wanted to do. Having to find behind-the-scenes jobs for students became a moot point. Between our two classrooms, we have 57 kids working on this project, and 45 students chose to work with Mike on dance.

Mike had the students divide themselves into groups. Before he did this he spoke to the kids about how to chose your group. We were worried, as teachers always are, that someone might get left out and that's a blow to the ego that we don't want anyone to feel. The groups formed and we had three girl crews and 3three boy crews. They crews then had to give their group a name, and decide on a culture they wanted to try to represent through hip hop.

I realize that asking kids to represent culture through art is a daunting task. To help them with this, Mike showed us a YouTube video that we could use as a starting place:
Quick Crew - China Concept

We watched many videos with students during our time with them, when the artists weren't at school. The students chose a culture that they wanted to learn about, did research, and wrote a report. We watched several videos where artists spoke out for change, and we learned about the globalization of culture. We also had to determine "What is culture?" I will write more about our part in the process in another blog post, but for this post, I just want to be clear that as teachers we supported the learning around culture and didn't just throw that at students without giving them the knowledge and front-end loading.

I'm not sure how students determined what culture they are representing. Watching their performances, it is clear that some groups demonstrate their learning in a much more concrete way than others. One of our groups has performed their dance around their learning from last year's TreatySmarts project. They have named themselves Empire and their dance demonstrates how Britain ruled over First Nation peoples. They wanted to be historically accurate, so they do have a choreographed battle scene. Another group is demonstrating Canadian hockey culture. Strangely, they do not have a fight scene in their dance. :)

The process of choreographing their dance happened over several weeks. We had students in every nook and cranny of our school working out their dance together. Mike went from group to group guiding and giving suggestions. His rule for them was simple: "You don't shut down someone else's idea."

To me, this is where the real learning happened. The kids had to learn to work together listening to someone's suggestion and figuring out how to work it into their piece. They also had to learn to give and take feedback from each other. This process didn't always go smoothly. I overheard Mike say to groups, "Well, then, you get 8 beats to decide what the group is doing; everyone gets 8 beats." I also heard him with one group of girls saying that since they were always shutting down each others' ideas and not listening to each other that each person would decide what to do in 8 beats. In those 8 beats they would entertain suggestions, and then be the final decision maker. As the choreographer of 8 beats you could say no to everyone, but no one could say no to you. Through these challenges, and through working through them, Mike gave the students tools to deal with conflict. He gave them the skills they needed to work together.

We often think of working together as something kids need to figure out when working in groups in Social or Science. We often overlook the power of the Arts. Here, students are learning to dance, and, on the surface, it may seem superficial or frivolous. We don't realize that there is way more going on in the process. Kids are learning to work together, to co-create, and to be creative. Seriously, there are some higher level thought processes going on when students are working in the Arts.

Another benefit of a project like this is that all kids have a voice. All kids are actively helping to create this performance. In other subjects, group work unfolds as the "leaders" being the boss, the kids who care about marks take on more work, and those kids who like to coast through things often get to coast. I really don't think that happened within these dance groups. If it did, it certainly wasn't as obvious.

To support this work, Dianne and I gave the groups time to perform nearly every day. When the dancers were dancing, the poets were writing or performing for each other. This work could not be done well without giving students time to work in their crews daily.

Once all of the group choreography was completed, Mike started a dance number with all students. This will be the final dance performance. I think that most of the poets were happy to get to be part of the final dance. They have witnessed what their peers were doing and even though their raps and poems are cool and were fun to work on, they still wanted to dance.

I would work with Mike again. I think the students at Vanier are fortunate to get to work with Mike and have a weekly dance class all year long. As educators, we need to understand the benefit for students and advocate for the Arts. The push for us to teach the core subjects of math, Language Arts, Science and Social Studies by governments and the Ministry means that sometimes we forget that the Arts are a core subject. They have their place in our students' lives. It's up to us as educators to help governments realize their importance. We also need to help build the Arts into our schools and classrooms.

Thank you to the Saskatchewan Arts Board for their financial support through an ArtsSmarts grant. The value of this project for our students is immeasurable.

Creating a rap

Over the past month and a half, my class has had the privilege of working with spoken word/rap artist, Jordan Schultz. I met Jordan last year over a lunch hour of spoken word poetry. Members of the group Write Out Loud came every Thursday to work with students on spoken word. "Work" is probably not a great description of what the students and artists did - really "play" would be a better word. They played with language and rhythm, and it was fun.
Jordan came with a bread bowl, the kind that your grandma lets dough rise in, and he made music. It was amazing, simple, and inspiring. I could see that he had the kids eating out of the palm of his hand. From that day on, I knew that I wanted to have Jordan come back to work with my students on an ArtsSmarts grant project.
Fast forward 8 months, and we are closing in on the end of our project. It has gone by in the blink of an eye. What Jordan has been working on is amazing and beautiful, and I want everyone to be able to hear what he has created with my students.
To describe the process, I probably need to go back to the beginning. In January, Jordan and two other artists came and worked with our students. Mike Mirlin taught the students a hip-hop dance piece, and Pavlo Isak taught the kids how to make graffiti style letters to create a "tag" name for themselves. Jordan worked on rhythm and percussion. Once he had the entire class making music, he performed several of his poems for us.
Our goal was simple - expose all students to all three forms of art, and eventually have them chose the form in which they wanted to become an "expert." All of our students had the opportunity to create and perform spoken word poems last year during our TreatySmarts grant project, so we knew that we could build on knowledge and skill developed last year.
After a few weeks of working with all artists, students were asked to make a choice that they would commit to for the project. Students were genuinely torn, and they didn't want to have to choose. They wanted to do it all. For many, it came down to this thinking: I did spoken word last year, but I didn't get to do hip-hop. I guess I'll try something new and do hip/hop.
Jordan ended up with a crew of 12 students that he worked with twice a week for entire afternoons. During sessions, he had the students play drama games to warm up and get comfortable. He had them create music through re-purposing junk, and he had them work on lyrics to a song. He discussed themes for the poems with students to help gel the group and their message.
Jordan created a hook and chorus with the students that flows in between student poems and binds the performance together.
He started with a rhythm on his kahoon and the line: We are all one rotating around the same sun. He called/sang this out to students and had them create a response that would work for students to call back to him. This process required students to put pencil to paper and count out beats as they came up with lines to call back. These lines also had to contain a simple message of acceptance and unity and ending racism. I tried to help by writing lyrics on the white board. When a student offered a lyric, we added it to the board, and tried it out. Jordan would drum and call out his line, or "hook" as he calls it, and students would call back their lyrics. After several afternoons, they had a beautiful and powerful message that sounded amazing.

Jordan brought artist Elizabeth Bekolay in to work with students on the musicality of the piece. She also helped finesse the lyrics.

The lyrics go something like this:

We're all one rotating around the same sun.
Teachers live in their students' wise actions.
We're all one rotating around the same sun.
Canada is a cultural nations.
We're all on rotating around the same sun.
Let's all help get rid of segregation.
We're all one rotating around the same sun.
No discrimination it's time to take action.

This piece has become a chorus that all students participate in during the spoken word/rap portion of the show.
This sounds pretty good, right? Well, it gets even better. Jordan and Elizabeth worked on a singing and rhythm component that all students helped create. We have a group of singers who do some "Ooohs," as well as a few sections of percussion. These parts were also created collaboratively with students. Elizabeth asked students to come up with what they thought would be good for background singing and percussion. To help kids to understand what they were being asked to create, both artists demonstrated through songs/raps that they had co-created. Jordan played his kahoon and Elizabeth her guitar. She sang along and he rapped. This process was repeated in my classroom as well as the grade 8 classroom. Students all had voice in how the music would be created, and in the end, Jordan and Elizabeth determined which ideas would be used.
We were fortunate to also have teacher candidate, Michelle Auser support this project. She helped us with the music and percussion while the artists weren't at our school. We were able to video record what had been created with the artists, and she picked up where they left off and helped us to organized the kids into sections that have specific instruments and rhythms.
During the past six weeks, we have given our poets time to write their own poems. Some students have chosen to rap and others prefer a spoken word style. I have been blown away by the creativity and courage of our poets. There have been times where I have questioned if they wrote the work themselves or if it was a song they had heard somewhere. It is so exciting and awesome to have kids tell you excitedly that they wrote the song themselves.
We are 3 days away from our final performance and I think we are all worried about how it will all come together. Our biggest challenge now will be properly using microphones so that the poets can be heard. The technical part of this production is way out of my realm of knowledge. Shaun Bzdel from St. Joseph High School will be helping us on Thursday afternoon and evening. PAVED Arts will also be helping us and so I hope, fingers crossed, that this can all come together on the last day.
It has been an honor to work with Jordan and Elizabeth. What they have accomplished with our students is powerful and beautiful. This is a project that could not be done without the support of the Saskatchewan Arts Board and an ArtSmarts Grant.