exhausted

I led 2 classes today for Warwick Students' Arts Festival's Family Day (the last one was scrapped because no children had registered for it) - one called Creative Movement (4-7s) and one Contemporary Dance (10-11s). I was nervous about the class because I didnt know how many children would turn up or what sort of abilities they'd have. And I was also nervous about teaching young children because I only taught older dancers (above 12s) so I was really grateful to my friend Alex who enthusiastically agreed to help me run my classes.

My first class was Contemporary Dance and I had 2. Yes, 2. Which screwed up my plans for a big dance number so it was all about improvisation. Led a little warm up, then we did a warm up exercise that we subsequently did variations of (like rearranging the sequence). After that I did a little contraction exercise and incorporated it into the dance (which instead of being a dance with multiple parts, ended up being me trying to mesh all the separate bits together into a long sequence. Altogether a pretty successful class and considering it was a Contemporary and Improvisation class, I think that was a pretty good Improvisation session for ME! one of the girls was really good and the other was, let's say, not very coordinated and also one of those smug little ones. Not that she was little, she was in fact pretty big-sized.

I had 6 adorable children in my Creative Movement class and we led a 25 min session mostly asking the children to use their imagination. We started off with a little stretching warm up before proceeding to do a high/low/big/small exercise. We asked the children to imagine themselves as trees (because there were quite a few boys) growing for a tiny seed all the way to the sky and slowly withering and returning to a seed (which is not very logical but hey!). While they were big strong trees, we got them to imagine they were swaying from gusts of wind. Then we had them be as small and they can, and as big as they can so some of the children crouched into little balls and when we asked them to be as big as they can, some spread out as big as they can on the floor while some jumped up. Next we had a walking game where we walked around the room and gave instructions such as (stop, nod, shake your head, walk fast, walk slow, get high, get low) and then we did opposites (like nod means shake your head, walk fast means walk really slow...). The last game we played was sort of like interpretations - imagine you are fire, water, ice, elephant, giraffe, duck, mouse. The children even made squeaky noises when they were pretending to be mice! And I utterly embarrassed myself when Alex pointed out that I looked like a chicken instead of a duck. :(

Alex and I helped Kirsty and Anna with their Tap class and it was pretty ok, a bit boring because there wasnt much progression in terms of teaching tap steps and the kids weren't mixing very well (3 of the 4 formed a little group of their own, possibly because they know each other, and isolated the other girl). But they had such a cute little dance prepared for the class to 'Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious' and I thought it was a nice way to introduce tap to children with no tap shoes.

All in all an exhausting day - not very successful in terms of an event but it was quite nice and lighthearted because we werent that stressed (since there werent that many participants).