international dance day 2024
Yesterday was International Dance Day, and let me tell you, my heart absolutely relishes the opportunity to dance more, celebrate and champion those that move.
To celebrate dance inclusively, embracing different ways to move that feel good for everyone.
Yesterday I was a lucky little dancer and got to dance and move my way through 5 different sessions and I wanted to share some of my highlights with you!
Cylch Meithrin, Builth Wells - My work here with their 3+4 year old learners is the best Monday morning pick me up! I try to be super intuitive to their creative needs as well as supporting them through a series of exercises and yesterday we did some extended parachute play at the end of the session. We went over, under and round the parachute, we shook it, lifted it up and down and even pretended it was a big blanket as we tucked ourselves in and had some bubbles! But the best part was turning it into a giant tent and letting them move around inside, it was just pure curious fun!
Rain Theatre, Llandrindod Wells - Brand new territory for me collaborating with Ian, Sirwan and our Rain Theatre participants. Ian brings a beautiful theatrical energy to these sessions and is such a bold storyteller, along with Sirwan providing the most responsive live music accompaniment and I then explore our stories and themes through movement. Yesterday we created a series of postcards depicting some of the places we’d been exploring in our run down seaside town and it was whilst moving around like a flock of very hungry seagulls we froze in a postcard screenshot and the variety of bird faces, wings and strange bodily shapes was just glorious - wish you’d been there!
Latch Dance 3+4 years - The imaginations in this class are second to none. The giggles and gasps as we explore and be curious together is just beautiful. Our theme this term is magic and yesterday at the end of our session we used our magical wands (thank you wooden musical claves) to turn Bella and Amy - our wonderful youth support team, into different things that the group thought up. So you can imagine we had frogs, rabbits, snakes and penguins but my favourite one by far was when one participant turned them both into a ‘red crayon’ which Bella and Amy acted out brilliantly where one of them was the crayon and the other a piece of paper, much to the sheer delight of the group!
Latch Dance 5 - 7 years - If you EVER want to get lost in a good imaginative story then you just have to spend 5 minutes with this group, their stories are just brilliant and always so engaging! As we continued to explore some duet work to The Greatest Showman I was in total awe of these young dancers as they tackled lifts, leaps and counter balances, one little boy surprised himself and even me by being able to jump lift me off the floor, it was SUCH a wonderful moment!
Latch Dance 8 - 11 years - This beautiful group are just incredible and last night was no exception! We’ve been exploring some foot and floor work this term as well as using Billie Eilish as our musical muse! We decided to end the session with a freestyle circle and a few members of the group had found a pack of feathers from my dance kit so we had feathered headpieces as well as some amazing moves. The whole thing turned into one giant conga (why does that always happen right?!) but it felt like a great way to celebrate international dance day!
So if you feel like a kitchen disco or having a belated International Dance Day bop then these 2 songs went down an ABSOLUTE treat yesterday Jain- Makeba and Little Simz - S.O.S
