back to projects

Experimental Children’s Online Dance Workshops lockdown 2020 – 2021

As all the schools were closed in lockdown, the regular creative dance classes I was teaching for children at Rushmore Primary School and Millfields Community School in Hackney were stopped. I started some online classes for children – keeping them deliberatley small so the children could build relationships with each other in the class. We played with the rectangular shape of the Zoom boxes on the screen. We played with how it’s possible to communicate and relate with each other through movement through the screens. As well as leading a ‘normal’ warm up and doing exercises playing with speeds, dynamics, different body moves and steps, isolating various body parts we also played with the fact that we were doing the class on a rectangular screen. We played with our proximity to the screen, how to move on and off, mirroring and other such experiments. The smallness of the classes added some focus and intimacy to the workshops. Although it’s sometimes very abstract to have to do the classes through the computer screen, it also has benefits – such as the children did not have the distraction of their louder classmates and they could get absorbed in the present moment of their imagination and movement ….. which is at the heart of the classes. It was a good opportunity to experiment with ways that children can get more absorbed in the classes and find virtual classes enjoyable, engaging and meaningful.