Notes from a 'Get Active' Zoom Dance Class

I spend a significant amount of time planning content for the classes I teach at this time of year. The last two weeks have very much reflective of this, including some additional consideration around delivering classes digitally.

The participants I teach vary in age, ability and intention, and I love the constant sense of flux from delivering technical dance classes for students studying dance at HE, to young people trying dance for the first time, via mature movers enjoying dance as a vehicle for being physical, creative and social. However, this year I've found this process jarring; I've found it a real challenge to make 'new' content, and I seem to be stuck in a pattern of habitual movement patterns and pathways; closed off in a sense. 

For me, my vocational training in dance was centered around classical ballet, and when I'm able to zoom out on the bigger picture, this highly codified movement pattering and positioning is ingrained somewhere deep within me. I seem to be much more aware of the innate movements pathways in my dancing at the moment, and other questions have emerged. Do the students I teach ever experience the nuances in the movement material I plan and deliver, and how does it feel for them? What can I learn from planning content that perhaps chooses not the first 'thing' that my body senses it wants to do, but rejects that for the second, third or even fourth choice? 

I delivered a 'Get Active' dance class for adults this morning via Zoom, and I really enjoyed exploring swinging and spiraling through the upper body, rhythmic salsa steps, finding connections (or disconnections!) between body parts, and drawing awareness to which body parts we're moving and where we are putting them in space, which has afforded me a real sense of discovery, empathy and interconnection. 

I suppose what I'm identifying is the magical and for me still slightly mysterious sense of my body knowing or predicting what's coming next, and actually thinking, discovering and clarifying whilst moving. What follows is for me to write down what's emerged, so I'm left with a written record of what I'm going to deliver. I have always written lesson plans down on paper, all be it usually a combination of stick men, squiggles and spider diagrams which perhaps reflects an openness to change informed by my perception of what's happening in the dancing space. Interestingly though, this process might provide a prompt, but on reflection I realise that the majority of the planning has happened in and is held within my body; my body knows the score!