curiouser and curiouser
During the Easter half term we spent such a fun morning at Wyeside Arts Centre in Builth Wells delivering dance sessions for children as part of their ‘mad hatters tea party’ family day and thought we’d shed some light on the process of creating bespoke workshops, curiouser and curiouser. . . .
The Approach
A lot of the time we love co-creating with our participants on themes they’d like to explore, styles they’d like to try and music they love to move too, it creates a really unique balance of teacher and child led exploration as well as ownership over what is created. However, when you’re delivering one off sessions with an already existing theme you definately don’t have the time to build up a solid co-created relationship so our approach is always to embed a lot of creative free play as well as some instructed/ led choreography so participants can go home feeling validated and seen but also like they have tackled and learnt something new, an ideal mix right?
Themes
Personally, we sometimes LOVE working with a specific theme, especially when it’s something we wouldn’t always choose ourselves, we do love a challenge! Often with a theme it’s about learning little bits about it and working out where movement is best placed! For Alice, there is almost too much we could do, there are so many characters to explore and Alice finds herself in so many different environments too. So we decided to work through a simple version of the story and structure our session in this order.
We started just like Alice, asleep under a tree and slowly stretched and woke our bodies up before spotting the white rabbit! So we created a warm up around lot’s of the characters; rushing and bouncing like the white rabbit, wiggling like the caterpillar, crawling like the cheshire cat etc and then when the tambourine sounded we all jumped up and dove onto the floor and balanced on our bellies - as if we’d just dived down the rabbit hole and were now floating all the way to the bottom. We took the idea of BIG and small when Alice tries different drinks and tried out lot’s of different shapes with our bodies that were both big and small and had a go at copying and sharing shapes. A fun game was using the colourful scarves as water and moving around the room with them in all sorts of fluid and watery ways, when the music stopped we then had to find the closest person to us and copy each other making a silly Tweedle-dee and Tweedle-dum shape - which caused a lot of joy and hysterics at all the amazing silly faces we could make! Alas here is where we injected some choreography and skill building by teaching a short duet that included a lift, a move with a partner and a floor sequence, which went down really well as this experience was shared with a friend - duets are the best! There was noway we could run an Alice workshop without exploring the mad hatters tea party and used the pictures in our book for shape and move inspiration, having a go at being tea-pots, cups, cakes and mice, we also moved like patterns on the tablecloth and had a big old wiggle, finishing with one final teapot shape that ‘poured’ as we leaned and balanced! Finishing off the workshop exploration by going back to the start as we fell asleep under the trees once more.
Validating and Sharing
We love it when it’s just dance for dance’s sake and there’s no pressure get things right and just be in the moment and enjoy the creativity and curiousness of self but being seen and validating creativity is really important to us so, with the consent of the group, we invited parents/ carers in at the end to watch as we journeyed through our Alice explorations and there was a united feel of joy and validation in the room.
What are our takeaways?
One off workshops can be a brilliant period of time to explore, connect and in the main HAVE FUN.
Themes help us think outside the box and move in ways we didn’t realise we could.
We want everyone to feel amazing about dance so stay open and intuitive to the vibe of your participants!
