Orff Schulwerk and Artistic Dance
Artistic Learning:
Development of skills in creative dance
Content
• DOING:
Improvisation with movement and dance; composing,
• THINKING:
Development of an artistic consciousness
• REFLECTING:
Deliberation of goals and methods; analysis
•
DOING: Development of an elemental, creative movement vocabulary; introduction to the
elements of dance (Body, Space, Time and Energy/Quality) based on Laban's theories and the
research of movement possibilities through guided explorations, differentiation, selection.
Kinaesthetic perception and movement intention; the imagination's link to the body.
•
THINKING: Awareness of the body as an instrument of movement. Pedagogical approaches
to teaching dance. Understanding the sensual aspects of dance. Awareness of the quality of
movement and it's intention. Elementary choreographic and improvisatory concepts.
Consideration of aesthetic perspectives.
•
REFLECTING: The goals of aesthetic education; dance-specific goals and connections
between music and dance as art forms. Discussion of teaching models.
© Christa Coogan
Orff Schulwerk and Artistic Dance
National Hsinchu University of Education
März 2010
OVERVIEW OF SELECTED EXERCISES
BREATH RHYTHM
Begin spread out in the space, standing. Become conscious of your breath. Slowly inhale,
sense the suspension of the breath, and slowly exhale. Sense the beginning, middle and
end of each breath. Let an arm rise with the slow inhalation and sink with the exhalation.
Use different body parts and then involve the entire body. What is the body's natural
movement during this breath rhythm? How can you elaborate, make specific choices?
-Now we try a slow inhalation and an explosive exhalation.
-Try a short, fast inhalation and a slow, deliberate exhalation.
-Try panting.
•Perception of breath
•Connection of breath to movement
•Phrasing: musicality
MOVEMENT INTENTION
Movement intention: the bodily expression of thoughts, images, memories, physical
sensations, and sounds.
WALKING, STANDING, SITTING, LAYING
Go thru the simple forms of lying down, sitting, standing, and walking in any order you want. Tempo is medium.
In the next few moments, begin to reduce your speed until your movements are in slow
motion. Pay attention to where you are; notice the sensations in your body; which muscles
do you use to go to sitting from standing? Which from laying to sitting? Where is the
concentration in your body? How is the energy in your body? Where is your focus? What
are the different states of mind arising?
From time to time speed up a section of your actions. Go very fast. But don't
plan it. This quickness is erratic.
•Movement intention
•musical sensitivity
•Time: tempo
•Imagery
Begin walking in space. Notice your focus. You are composing as you walk, as you see your relationship to
the others in the space, to the space itself.
SENSORY PERCEPTION / with a partner:
-The leader has closed eyes and has the right arm supported by the left arm of the partner. Feel weight of elbow
resting in partners' arm. The follower's eyes are open to protect partner as s/he moves through the space.
Images: openness of ankles related to openness of throat; weight of elbow mirrors the weight of pelvis as it
releases towards the floor...
-Gently let arm down and change roles.
-Discussion/Reflection
-change roles again but at some point the open-eyed person will stand and let down the arm of the partner,
moving to a new partner (who is standing, with eyes closed). Walking with partner; changing partner as
aforementionned.
-change roles
-Discussion in pairs
DANCE DUET (incorporating intention, sensory perception, breath perception)
-stay with your last partner. Mover's eyes are closed. Partner places right hand below the elbow of mover,
© Christa Coogan
Orff Schulwerk and Artistic Dance
National Hsinchu University of Education
März 2010
holding their right arm securely. The left arm is under the shoulder blade of the mover. The partner breathes into
his/her hands, releases weight into floor.
-when ready, the mover moves right arm or back. Holder follows movement, still attached. At some point the
mover can also allow the left arm to move, as counterpoint. Gradually the holder releases the pressure of his/her
hands on the partner, and then the hands release altogether from the body.
Holder is still present to keep mover protected. When necessary you can touch them again for guidance.
-change roles
-immediately following this last duet, come to prepared paper and pen and in one minute write down all what
comes into your mind and out through your pen.
-if you wish, share this with your partner.
-Diskussion/Reflectionen in the group
DYNAMICS/QUALITY
Space Effort: direct/flexible
Extending/expansion/outwards
inwards/crossing/
Time structure: 8,8,4,4,2,2,2,2
Flow Effort:
free/bound
Time Effort:
fast/slow (with acceleration/deceleration)
group improvisation: From stillness.
Weight Effort:
strong/delicate
CHANGE / CHANGE
This improvisation, done individually today, is an exploration of movement possibilities: We
begin with clear movements. At the call to change, these movements are stopped abruptly
and in an instant another movement idea begins. The changes are steered by the
kinesthetic sense and not by a thought process that thinks up the next movement.
•kinaesthetic awareness
•helps the body to „think“ and to dive into movement and
movement qualities
CHANGE/CHANGE Variation
Take a partner and spread out in the space. Partner A is the dancer, and receives from
Partner B specific movement directives having to do with qualities, images, and feelings, as
well as body parts, actions, space and time. Switch roles.
•expansion of movement vocabulary through awareness and
sensitivity of partner
•movement intention
•sensory awareness: hearing
ABOVE/BELOW
Form a trio. One person dances, how she wishes, on a low level. The other two dancers
„mirror“ her material, on the middle or high level, with complementary, related movements.
•sensory awareness:seeing
•forming
•space: levels
•expansion of movement spectrum through manipulation and
development
© Christa Coogan
Orff Schulwerk and Artistic Dance
National Hsinchu University of Education
März 2010
MIRROR/SHADOW
With a partner. One person begins to dance and is shadowed and/or mirrored by the other.
The call to change roles, again and again, is given by the teacher. This necessitates an
immediate movement decision from the new leader of the pair, and an equally quick
response in imitation from the follower. Change partners and repeat the improvisation.
Reflection questions: How does breath relate to your movement choices? Can you now
follow someone else's movement more easily? What impulses came from the new
partner? What did you notice about your partner's movement preferences?
FREEZE DUETS (incorporating compositional ideas and movement imagery)
Form groups of 4. 2 begin to dance together. At some point one of the observers calls
out „freeze“ and moves into the space to replace one of the dancers. The duet continues.
The intention of the preceding duet must not be continued but movement ideas can be
developed and manipulated.
FREEZE QUARTETS
Two groups form. 2 begin to dance. The same concept as before but the duet may expand
to include up to 5 dancers.
LEVELS-SPACE
feel floor with your hand --slide hand and then stop, pressing into floor
-what does it feel like (words (weight, suction, rooted,,,,,...)
-begin moving with stops built in where the hands are like suction cups;
-add feet and continue with feet and hands
-with space displacement
-buttress
-table
-bench
-lizard
always with stop.
-Attention to transition so slowly, at least at first. going from hi to low /low to hi
-Begin with partner; find the empty spaces with your levels and with the stops. Now add dynamics. Find an
end position. Find another end position.
BODY SHAPE
-walking in space - different directions
- one stops, all stop; 1 begins to walk, all walk
-in partner: one person makes a shape. The partner feels the shape (with closed eyes) and tries to
reproduce the shape in their body.
BODY ACTIONS
-actions with 4 counts each: Locomotion/stretching/turning/elevation
© Christa Coogan
Orff Schulwerk and Artistic Dance
National Hsinchu University of Education
März 2010
Dance as aesthetic education
by Christa Coogan
15 children sit on the edges of their seats, straining forward so as not to miss a single second of
the action on the stage. Their heads move like tennis balls, to the right, sharply to the middle,
again right, now a slower scanning over to the left:
Dancers keep coming through the door, talking (but we don't hear them), laughing (but we don't
know about what). Skirts swirl, dancers twirl and jump, around and around, high off the ground.
Suddenly a dancer hangs upside down from inside the door frame, swinging like a pendulum.
Laughter has turned to a hushed murmur, the sound of a church bell gongs in the distance, the
door frame is slowly pushed off the stage. Some of the children turn towards each other,
whispering. Others chide them to be quiet – they don't want to miss what happens next.
A
burst of color and a black top dashes from right to left and is stopped midway by a calm man.
The black top is black frizzy hair connected to a woman in an orange wool skirt, dark green shirt,
yellow socks and black laced-up shoes. They begin to dance with one another. She lifts his leg
and glides underneath; he spins, drops onto one knee, rolls away from her only to explode
upwards and fall into trustingly but heavily into her arms. The dancers are now nose to nose...
– the children twitter and giggle
might come -
- but before they can cover their eyes to block off the kiss that
a water pistol appears in the hand of the woman dancer and she squirts her partner lovingly.
She aims between his bare toes and squirts his face; she flees grinning but he soars past her
and flicks the droplets from his face. She twists and bends, he squiggles around and through
her, jumps on to her piggyback, slides off to turn and watch her leap over him, and then land like
a baby in his arms.
A few of the children appear to be as breathless as the dancers, but motionless, while others
pull their legs up onto the chair to sit higher and see better. The dance continues.
During the intermission everyone has a response to the dance and keen observations. The man
in the woman's dress was funny...he was drinking out of her shoe...the woman really squeezed
into the suitcase...the dancers exploded just like the balloons...
Imagine haven taken a 3rd grade class of children to the state ballet theater for a performance of
Mats Ek's A Sort of. These children were not part of a typical audience firstly, because they are
children and secondly, because they participated in a creative dance project through their school
and so they knew something about contemporary dance.
There are wide reaching benefits that children experience when they are guided into the realm
of elemental, creative dance. Because it engages the body, the mind and the spirit, creative
dance offers children many ways to learn about themselves. Their bodily-kinaesthetic, musical
and spatial intelligences are stretched as they work on mastering movement and dance skills,
their cognitive skills are called upon as they learn and understand movement concepts, their
personal skills develop as they learn to cooperate with one another and as they perceive and
value the creative expression of themselves and of others. These benefits also give children a
vocabulary to know about dance. They have felt manifestations of time, of space and of qualities
in their own bodies, seen it in other bodies and learn to reflect and to verbalize these
experiences and observations.
These are aspects of art appreciation and of aesthetic education. Aesthetic education inspires
students to question and reflect, and it involves perception, cognition, affect, and the
imagination. At the core of this approach is the belief that the perception and understanding of
art, like the perception and study of mathematics, science or language, is critical to successful
teaching and learning. Aesthetic education is an approach that is neither “art for art’s sake” nor
using the arts as a vehicle for teaching other subjects, but a third process that incorporates
elements of both. Generally, it covers discussions appropriate to the interest of the children,
about beauty and aesthetics: What is beautiful? Why? What makes a movement beautiful?
Further, the remote art pedestal is vanquished: one experiences art as connected to one's own
© Christa Coogan
Orff Schulwerk and Artistic Dance
National Hsinchu University of Education
März 2010
life and is enjoyable. It teaches how to assemble, differentiate, abstract, and select experiences,
ultimately arranging them into form that allows these personal experiences to be meaningful to
others. More specifically, this approach to dance is a wonderful preparation to accept,
understand and to enjoy the concert dance of our time, be it on an international level (with
choreographers such as Jiri Kylian, William Forsthye, Pina Bausch, and Mats Ek) or on a local
level as well as dance in it's other social and artistic constructs.
Elemental, creative dance for children begins with the experience of physical conciousness and
exploration of the elements of dance through clearly structured improvisational play. The child is
not taught a style or technique (as is the case of ballet, jazz, hip-hop, butoh, or african styles)
but rather he is asked to uncover and develop individual way of expressing his ideas, thoughts,
and feelings through movement, discovering his own kinaesthetic signature.
And music
Dance is an art form in and of itself but is intimately connected to music. Elemental dance offers
a broad access to realizing this relationship. Children discover parallels in ideas of form and
structure, be it that smallest building block, the phrase, the AB form or the extended rondo form.
They draw bridges between musical and dance parameters such as tone color and movement
quality or pitch and movement levels. Music begins to be understood on an analytical level. But
of course children react to rhythm and to the powerful atmospheric pull of music as well. Their
senses are awakened, their imaginations are stimulated and thus music is internalized on
emotional and associative levels.
Occasionally in creative dance classes children dance with only the pulse of their hearts and the
sound of their breath as musical companionship. Music is neither a support nor a crutch; here
they must follow the body's music, the body's poetry. A child's dancing becomes invested with
rhythm, phrasing and atmosphere that have sprung from deep sources within and connect with
skills and concepts they have acquired in their dance lessons.
© Christa Coogan
Orff Schulwerk and Artistic Dance
National Hsinchu University of Education
März 2010
Outline of the lecture:
I.
Introduction
How is one to perceive, to comprehend and to interpret movement, especially dance
movement?
Dance can be seen as a system of signs that convey meaning or as a symbolic
transformation of experience. Or it can be viewed as formalistic, nonrepresentational
and non-symbolic. Dance includes spatial, temporal, visual, affective,
visceral and sensual components, is not independant of context and is considered a nonverbal –
or, non-vocal language.
II.
Can one read movement?
Is perceiving, comprehending and interpreting dance the same as 'reading dance'?
One is challenged to follow thoughts of movement, to perceive visual patterns and
to capture communicative intent. The difficulties in doing so are well-known: the
fleetingness of the dancing moment, the appeal to and the activation of the senses,
the surge of multidimensional information which reaches the dance viewer.
The above complexities lead us to presume that one can't read dance in a similar
way that one reads a book or some other kind of written text.
Nevertheless, can we understand dance movements to be a form of text? If so,
what kinds of 'rules' other than linguistic ones would elucidate the dance text?
III.
How is reading defined?
-dictionary definition
-the medium „movement“ is a system of information which insures that medium-specific
concepts and principles function as well as communicate. As an information-carrying form,
movement can thus be understood as a form of text.
-Different dance forms have an identifiable lexicon of movements.
 classical ballet has a vocabulary of named steps and a grammatical system
 Bharatanatyam, one of the 8 forms of classical Indian dance, has a vocabulary which
names 108 transitional movements, specific gestures for the hands, precise locomotive
steps, head and eye movements.
- these movement lexiconsallow us compare dance to spoken and written languages.
- meaning also gathered in signs and symbols outside of the linguistic realm, movement as
a textual form cannot be fully grasped within the conventional, classical philological sense.
- It must be understood in an expanded definition of 'reading'
IV.
In what ways can the reading of movement make sense?
-How is dance movement seen? In which ways is it possible to understand the movement
we see or to ascertain knowledge about it? How does movement communicate something
to us and through which channels do we understand this communication?
-watch a 30 second dance sequence.
- what kinds of information become apparent during the act of observation? How
do we make sense out of this information?
-2 kinds of knowledge in the medium of movement:
- motor knowledge:
structural analysis of movement. It is the classification of
© Christa Coogan
Orff Schulwerk and Artistic Dance
National Hsinchu University of Education
März 2010
movement as well as aiding in the production of and the reproduction of individual
movements and dance sequences.
-useful in the area of dance performance, whether for rehearsals, for teaching or notational
purposes. Useful in the area of music performance
- kinaesthetic knowledge: the reception of the movement.
-useful in area of movement interpretation; poetic description;
V.
dance criticism
Kinesthesia
comes from the Greek:
kinein = movement and aisthesis = perception or sensation: the sense of movement.
movement feels like“. 1
„What
'Movement sensation', 'muscle sense', 'proprioception' and 'deep sensibility' - synonyms for a notion
that exists since the 19th century. In 1880 the british neuroscientist Henry Bastian2 coined the word
kinesthesia in his book The Brain as an Organ
-physiology: muscle sense.
-20th c. : neurophysiology and sport science: proprioception
-later 20 th c: kinesthesia in psychology
kinesthesia: as a physiological process in which the complete sensory output of the reception
systems of the muscles, ligaments, tendons, joints and skin is sent along to the central nervous
system, informing it of the direction and the speed of specific movements of the body, the spatial
relationship of the body parts to each other, muscular tension and impetus.
ALSO
kinesthesia is a cognitive-psychological process through which one understands
kinaesthetic perception as being the sensation of one's own movement as well as being able to
empathize with another person's movement.
kinaesthetic activity is formed from our somatosensory system. (Charles S. Sherrington (1906) )
1.exteroceptors: the orthodox definition of the five senses – seeing, hearing, touching,
smelling, tasting; give information about objects and happenings from the external world.
2. interceptors: source for internal information; information about the condition of our
own organism, such as blood pressure, sensations of pain and body temperature.
3. proprioceptors: receptors found in the muscles, tendons, joints, the vestibular apparatus
of the inner ear and according to some definitions, the skin as well; enable us to walk in the dark
and keep our balance, sending information from the receptors in our feet to the central nervous
system and reacting deftly to slight changes in surface or slants of the floor.
-somatosensory system enables one to sense the movement of one's own body. But can
this system allow us to perceive the movement of another person, to participate in the
movements one observes but doesn't actually do in a way that is independant of the visual
sense? Can it aid in stimulating our physical sensations of their body shape, their tempo
and their muscular effort?
VI.
Perception
-Wolf Singer: neuroscientist at the Max Planck Institute for Brain Research in Frankfurt in western
Germany - quotes about perception.
-during the process of perception two different kinds of memory are activated:
- procedural memory (dancers refer to this as muscle memory).
Here motor and sensory capacities are stored, which can, through practice, be
developed. It is this memory which is triggered when one learns a new movement
1
2
Smyth, p. 21.
Bastian, H.C: The brain as an organ of mind, London 1880, ( quoted in: Huschka 2002), Hartewig, p. 24.
© Christa Coogan
Orff Schulwerk and Artistic Dance
National Hsinchu University of Education
März 2010
sequence or recalls old patterns. The procedural memory allows one to learn the
pattern of the waltz step, and to hop on a bicycle and ride it again after a 20 year
break.
-episodic memory, also called the declarative; is dependant upon context. With
this autobiographical memory, events and experiences are ordered within
a time
frame and given sequence; associated emotions to particular situations are
remembered. One remembers the partner with whom one danced the waltz that
first time and in which year or decade; or the bike trip over the alps to
Venice is
remembered and images, smells and perhaps the music of that trip are
recaptured.
The distinctiveness in the observation of movement and dance is that in the process of perception
both these forms of memory are called upon and are in fact inseparably interwoven with one
another.
-kinesthetic empathy, engendered between the dancer and the spectator: continues to
be rigorously investigated. Neurophysiological research using functional Magnetic
Resonance Imaging (fMRI) has shown which brain regions are active in the observation
of dance. Dancers watching other dancers have the highest activity in these regions. Yet,
if an observer has himself made a movement similar to one the dancer is making, his brain
regions are also activated, though to a lesser extent. If, for instance, the dancer leaps
across the stage, the observer is stimulated to remember his leap over a stone or over a
puddle and to feel this leap in his body.
VII. Film excerpt: a kinesthetic analysis
VIII. Conclusion
it is kinesthesia which bestows the movement phemomena dance with it's particular
characteristics and dimensions of expression.
Quote: ...
As observers we can't block out historical contexts nor motor analysis any more than we can
approach the dance from an emotionally and experientially objective angle. Furthermore, it seems
that there are as yet no conclusive studies which analysize the effect music – either affectively or
rhythmically – has on kinaesthetic empathy or kinaesthetic communication.
© Christa Coogan
Orff Schulwerk and Artistic Dance
National Hsinchu University of Education
März 2010