Delight in Dance: Heroes vs Villains draws children into a magical world of dance storytelling, building a love of movement and self-expression, strengthening teamwork, and increasing engagement with literacy learning.
Delighting dance is a six week dance storytelling project.
Playful and particular are the story detectives in charge of the library collection. They’re on a quest and need the children’s help to find the most important story of all your story.
Over half a term children work with made by Katie Green dancers and class teachers to create their own dance stories, perform these to family and friends, and use the inspiration to write their own stories.
A great opportunity to break down any preconceptions of what dance is and build a love of movement and self-expression.
I think that teachers are great because they just give it a go and they’re really open to just trying new things and because they have lots of resources to support them, like PowerPoints and short videos, and they do a training session with us as well. So they feel they’ve got all the things that they need to be able to recap and remember what they’re doing with the children.
The CPD we did where Ms. Winder and I got to learn the dance moves. We realized how difficult it would be for the children, but then we also realized that we managed to learn it in 45 minutes roughly, and we are not great dancers and we had a great time doing it. So we knew the children would like it and it gave us the confidence going in to join in straight away.
So all of the children have grown in confidence. I just a few short weeks, but there have been some children who perhaps might have been a bit reluctant to join in at first and their confidence is overwhelming to see them now wanting to be up, wanting to perform, really taking on the role. And yet we’ve even now got some budding new actors in our midst that you would not have uh, imagined before. Overall I think it’s just given our children’s open doors for them, new opportunities, possibilities, and that’s really what this project has been about for us.
For my class in particular, there’s a really high EAL and I think hearing the vocabulary that they’re using now, if it’s even describing like the sharp movement, I think as a school we’re really pushing vocabulary, so that has been fantastic to see that come out and I’m really looking forward to reading their stories to see how that will embed into their writing as well.
I wrote my own story and about my character and um, a hero and the villain is me and the hero is called Delilah.
My favorite was the Captain Youer. You choose. When I release my energy, I enjoy it because my dream is to be an actor and when I’m acting I just like feel the idea that I’m really here. I just like feeling inside I’m here
Over six weeks, children develop the skills, language and confidence to create their own Hero vs Villain dance stories which they document in a Dance Journal and perform to families.
Beginning with an interactive film screening of the Story Detectives by professional dance company Made By Katie Green, children work with professional dancers and their teacher to develop dance skills in a series of progressive learning workshops designed to be accessible to all and engage even reluctant dancers.
Created by Delight in partnership with dance company Made by Katie Green.
