Beginnings - Response to Adesola Akinlaye’s blog 28/01/2019

Beginnings

Response to Adesola Akinlaye’s blog 28/01/2019 

 

Reading Adesola’s blog on beginning’s made me reflect on the beginning of my teaching career in 1980. It was at a school that was a private school during the day and a dance school in the evenings and at weekends. Effectively it was managed almost like a performing arts school or stage school.

There was my interview with a strong and quite intermediating principal! That was the official beginning. The energetic beginning was the first class that I taught. A group of wonderful children all eager to soak up the knowledge of Greek dance. The first show I was involved in as a teacher there was in the first term of my starting. The show was basically a showcase of the performing arts subjects taught in the school. Ie children playing musical instruments, reading poetry, singing and of course dance. It was performed in a professional theatre and started at 7.00pm and finished 10.45pm! There were no links to any of the pieces just a random collection of pieces.

Moving forward to a performance that I created last year, 2018. I still used students from my own dance school, and it was still what one might call a showcase for our school, but I used a theme of a Fair ground/circus. Each piece was linked with a poem or vocal arrangement to set the scene for the next piece. I wanted the audience to feel as though they were being taken on a journey rather than just watching a series of dance pieces waiting for their son/daughter to appear on the stage!

One of the professional dance pieces that I have enjoyed the opening of is Emancipation of Expression. If you have not seen it, you can find it on the Blue Boy Entertainments page.www.blueboyent.com One of the stimuli of the piece was to express oneself through movement. The opening act is called Genesis. It begins with dances laying on the floor and one dancer standing underneath a series of blue lights. The piece begins and the dancers lying on the floor begin to move in jerky sudden moves as though ‘hatching’ from an egg. Finally, they grow until standing and expressing themselves through individual movement. This beginning had an impact on me for two reasons. When I read about the genre of piece, I wasn’t excited by the fact that it was hip hop/contemporary piece. I’m afraid I had a preconceived idea about what it would be like. The opening section blew away any previous thoughts that I had that I would not enjoy the piece. I felt in that opening that my mind was beginning a journey of awakening to a form of dance that I had not yet appreciated as an art form. Perhaps it would be classed as an effective beginning. The moment when thoughts are shifted and changed?