Making Waves
Developing Ideas
Lesson Plan 2 – Voyages: meeting and parting
Aim
To encourage children’s team work and choreographic skills, through developing movement ideas
previously generated from National Maritime Museum stimulus, creating duets and groups dances
that communicate Voyages that meet and part.
Objectives
Participants will…
 Re-cap material created in previous session
 Learn how to have contact and safe touch in balancing and supporting others
 Work within a team to explore choreographic structures of relationship and space with others
Stimulus
Resources
Key Words
Voyages
Journeys
Meeting and parting
Images or stories from the National Maritime
collection related to journeys.
National Maritime Museum online collection
Music
Contact/Safe touch
Team work
Canon / Unison
Activities
Introduction:
 Review of what children worked on in the previous lesson – creating duets that used travelling
movements to meet and part
Warm-up: introducing contact
Use this game to establish contact between the whole group.
 Children walk around the space, the teacher then calls out body parts that the students have to
connect to another person with (pairs only): hand to hand, knee to knee, back to back.
On the call of ‘change’ everyone moves freely around the space again. Repeat until children have
worked with several partners.
 This can be extended using a mix of body parts: elbow to knee, foot to back.
Exploration and development:
 Begin by re-capping the duets created last week.
Developing Contact
 After initiating safe touch in the warm-up exercise develop the duets by adding a moment of
contact on meeting in the middle. This may be a simple moment/connection or a balance
together.
 Explore different ways of meeting and connecting/balancing. How do the different approaches to
holding, supporting or balancing with your partner communicate?
 Then select, refine and rehearsing the duet working in unison.
Developing Group work
 Combine two or three duets to work together to create a group dance
 Select a group formation: where could you stand in relation to each other in the space to make an
interesting group dance? Children keep their individual duet movement with their partner the
same, but explore how the duets can move together or alternately in the space.
Example formations:
::

Two duets/four people: start diagonally opposite your partner on the four corners of a square ( ),
one duet start moving together actions, when they part the other duet starts to move in – creating
an opposition effect with the two duets alternately moving towards then away from each other.

Three duets/six people: (
) lined up, partners facing each other. In canon, duets take it in turns
to move towards and away from their partner,creating a canon (Mexican wave) along the line
:::

Encourage dancers to think of other formations within their group.
What did we learn? Performance, appreciation and evaluation:
 Children can watch and feedback to each other at different stages of the process, assessing and
giving constructive feedback on how the ideas are developing.
Do the duets and/or groups demonstrate the idea of meeting and parting?
Cool-down and plenary
 Use gentle stretching exercises to bring the breathing and body back to normal