Incorporating 5 stimuli for Dance compositions

This last workshop involved choreographing our own dance steps based on our group’s response to different stimuli. The stimuli were based on 5 different learning styles and they are: visual, ideational, auditory, tactile and kinaesthetic. We all got to choose which group we wanted to be in.
I reckon this would make for a very good dance lesson in the future as it would be great to give the children the same choice in the classroom.

Visual

• This should just be an object that is visually interesting/stimulating
• We had a wooden object that showed a woman. 
• We were to describe it visually, write down how it made us feel, and then create a context for this object.
• Students then use this to choreograph dance steps based on 2 counts of 8.

Ideational

• This is when a dance is created in response to a story.
• The picture book 'Henry and Amy' was used by Stephen Michael King
• The group that did this choreographed the dance steps based on the theme of friendship.

“Early one morning when Henry was out walking backwards, trying very hard to walk forwards, he bumped into Amy.”
Henry and Amy (right-way-wound and upside down), by Stephen Michael King
Scholastic, 199, reprinted 2005

Iris read the book to the class. We talked about types of contrasting movement which the two characters have. We can elicit these contrasting terms from our students:straight/wiggly, look up/look down, right/left, front/back, back-to-front, topsy-turvy, upside down
We will then get students to explore these movements. Then compose a set of 2 counts of 8 beat movements.
*Note: There are other picture books that we could use. Some activities with The Island (Armin Greder) and My Place (Nadia Wheatley) are outlined in Gibson & Ewing (2011, pp44-48)
Reference: Gibson, R. & Ewing, R. (2011). Transforming the curriculum through the arts. Palgrave Macmillan, VIC, South Yarra.

Auditory

• We listened to the first few bars of a song.
• Create a dance of 2 bars of 8 beats
• an integrate Music into a lesson such as this – focus on the pitch, mood and dynamics of the song in musical terms before allowing students by trying out moves and actions.

I was in this auditory group because when I heard the song, I immediately thought of the dance moves and I really really liked the melody of the song. It was very Christmas-sy and I could in my head imagine a couple dancing in each others arms. We decided to choreograph an up beat and more swinging and lyrical sort of style for this song. With an open-ended task it was a very enjoyable and imaginative process, and one which really promoted collaboration.

Tactile

• Before introducing the other stimuli, Iris passed an object in a bag – and we weren’t allowed to peek. What we needed to do was reach in and feel what it was.
• This involves the students feeling but not seeing an object
• In this case, it was a something that was wooden, and very prickly and thorny. (I immediately thought of a durian).
• Students then use this to create choreography

The students in my workshop were able to recognise that it was an object that was bursting and prickly. They created a dance about a something in the middle shooting to get out from the confines within. 

Kinaesthetic

• This was based on the quality of the movement itself and meaning was made out of those movements and actions.