Year 6 Performing Arts

Term 4, Week 1

Welcome Back!

Hi everyone, I hope you have all had a lovely, well-earned holiday.

I am so excited to see you all back at school next week!

This Term, we are going to be learning about Choreography (creating dances).

We will be creating a dance that I hope to use for your graduation!

Today, we will be learning the most important understandings about choreography so that we can work towards creating our own dance.

Understanding #1: Patterns in Dance

  • Most dances repeat actions in a pattern - this makes the dance easier to learn and more predictable for the audience (the audience likes to feel clever!)

  • Usually dances are created using counts of 4 or 8 beats

  • Watch the YouTube video to watch for patterns of actions that repeat

  • See if you can join in some of the dance - can you figure out what comes next because of the patterns?

Understanding #2: Hints or actions to match the lyrics (words in the song)

Watch all three of these videos to see the progression from very literal actions to the lyrics, to a dance that has just a few hints.

Very literal: lots of actions to match the lyrics

Some references to the lyrics

Just a few hints of the lyrics - can you spot them?

Understanding #3: Contrast

Contrast - keeping things interesting

  • The best dances have contrasts in the choreography, to keep the audience interested. Some of these contrasts might be:

      • HIGH and LOW movements

      • LITTLE and BIG movements

      • JOLTY and SMOOTH movements

      • FAST and SLOW movements

  • What contrast or opposites can you see in this dance? List at least 5.