Dance and Kinesthetic Movement

April 12, 2008

During each class session at Lesley, we learn how to best provide our students with the transformative tools they need grow as human beings. We do this by engaging in the teaching of the creative arts. Each month, we take time away from our work to engage in collaborative projects, group discussions and presentations that all serve to challenge us to become change agents in our schools and local communities. As a group, we all enter into the generative process and begin to imagine the kinds of discoveries that our students will experience when we assign them lessons. Our program is the Integrated Arts Program and we are currently finishing a course entitled Dance and Kinesthetic Movement taught by Doug Victor, a Lesley University professor who spent time studying with Barbara Mettler.
In class, we are encouraged to move in “new and different ways” and to learn to slow ourselves down to capture the movements that flow from our hearts, memories and from the images that we perceive around us. We explore ways to engage the mind by stimulating parts of the body and speak about the importance of dance in schools. Public education these days does an excellent job teaching children from the top up. In class, several of the teachers noted that this was the case. These teachers all agreed that the teaching of movement in the classroom should not be limited to the early grades. Why one might ask, when in our society the ‘heady’ jobs seem to be the well respected jobs. The way things are going now, those individuals who study and remain on the “path” so to speak might as well all become professors. God help us all meeting up with a crew like that on the dance floor. Well, perhaps that isn’t fair. Of course many people who hold the 'heady' jobs can dance. My point being that any time we place expectations on our children we should tread lightly. Every child moves through their developmental stages at slightly different rates, and it is up to the educator to stay on his or her toes and accommodate the student in a safe and responsible manner. Dance is an excellent tool for teachers to use to help establish group trust and help build student confidence in the classroom. Dance can be cathartic because as human beings, when we hold on to old memories and emotions for too long, these feelings can actually manifest themselves into physical maladies. When a dancer moves to the music, he or she is activating the unconscious dream mind and when the movement takes place creating new muscles memory and corresponding emotions. In class, Victor mentioned how someone had once told him that when dealing with depressed individuals the best thing to tell them to do is to listen for the up beat in the music to experience positive change.
So why then, in so many (not all) of our schools do we continue to stress product over process and place the emphasis on exemplary performance. Could it be that those in charge of making the decisions about the ways in which children should spend their time while at school are actually asleep to the children’s’ dreams and only pay attention to their own. To rule dance as a “normal” part of P.E. or as a subject would benefit both parties. Dance is a method of self-expression that manifests itself in an outward manner, stimulating the body, mind and imagination of the dancers and the audience. This allows for the audience to become a part of the transformative process, if they so choose, as they watch and listen carefully to the music and the moves. Dance is a bearer of freedom because it binds the creative, sculptural elements of life together and encourages dancers to express their inner most thoughts (often symbolic in nature) through the movements that their bodies make. Why teach that such a transformative, powerful subject matter should be kept outside of academia? The term “assessment” is used frequently and is a necessary way for teachers to measure the quality of their students work. Could it be that for some instructors, dance is viewed as too subjective to be graded. When dance Professor Victor entered into our classroom, we arranged our chairs in a circle and he told us that the origin of the word assessment actually means “to sit beside.” We began to think about what it actually meant to sit beside one another and were introduced to the term Kino- sphere, a term used to describe an invisible area around each individual (like a personal space bubble) and opened our minds to the prospect of introducing dance into our classrooms in “new and different ways”. Victor encouraged us throughout the course to leave our seats in “new and different ways” when moving from one area of the room to another, so that by the end of the course we grew to enjoy this experience and this became a part of our collective class culture.
So now, as we return to teaching, it is imperative that we work together to restore the soul of our communities and classrooms and begin to invest in developing a new kind of environment for our kids, a creative classroom culture. Creative dance and movement provides the dancer with an avenue to bring forth parts of their spiritual self instinctively, as the movement of the piece is shared with an audience. There is something magical that occurs when the dancer no longer has to sort through all of the steps and any weeds have been extracted from the merging of music and movement, until what is truly left is an authentic piece. This is when it is possible for the outward expression of the dance to serve as an active, transformative agent for both the dancer and the audience.