Accelerated Motion: Towards a New Dance Literacy in America

1.) Honing Our Senses

In this section, you and your students will enliven your senses in order to open your awareness to your surroundings. These activities can be undertaken in conjunction with an existing curricular unit focusing on the environment (climate, geography, migration…), or as a lesson on its own.

Reading:

Burdick, Alan (2003) Four Ears to the Ground.

Activity 1: Inside/Outside Environment

Lead your students through the following experience. This exploration can take place anywhere - with students seated in the classroom, lying down in the gym, or outside. Feel free to use the directions below as a guide; read them aloud to your students; feel free to take more or less time, add your own imagery, and pose other questions:

Close your eyes. (3-5 minutes)
Notice your breathing.
Relax as you take air in from the environment with your inhalations, and send it back out with your exhalations. Take a minute or two to focus on this.
Notice any other physical movement or internal sensation: heartbeat; pulse; digestion; aches or pains; temperature.
Pay attention to the surface of your body and its interaction with the space: what you are sitting on; what you are leaning against; air temperature; light; sounds; smells; textures.
Open your eyes. (30 seconds)
What are the first things you notice in the environment around you?
Close your eyes and pay attention again to the internal sensations. (1 minute)
Open your eyes and try to pay attention to both inside and outside. (3 minutes)

Stand up and move slowly around the room, simultaneously paying attention to your internal landscape and the external environment. What do you notice? How much of what you were aware of when you were in one place are you able to perceive while moving?

Discussion Topics

What internal physical sensations did you notice?
In what ways did you notice your physical interaction with the space?
What did you notice about the environment around you when your eyes were closed?
What are the first things you noticed in the environment around you?
Which of your senses were you aware of? (Most aware of? Least aware of?)_
Consider the “Four Ears to the Ground” reading. What in our environment may we be desensitized to, and to what effect?

Activity 2: Place Visit and Journal

Read or hand-out the following assignment to your students:

Find a place outdoors that you can visit, undisturbed, repeatedly over the duration of this unit (week, month, semester, year). You will return to this ‘visiting place’ three times over the duration of this unit. Spend at least ten to fifteen minutes there. First close your eyes and breathe (as we did in class). Inviting awareness, open your eyes and focus on the quality and details of this place. You may focus on a small area within the space, or on a specific thing within the space (ie: a tree, rock, the breeze, a shadow, color, texture, sound, etc). Notice the details and quality of this place. Consider pathways, boundaries, shapes, and other qualities. Notice any effects this place and the things in it have on you. Breathe deeply and allow an exchange between the inner landscape of your body and the outer landscape of place.

Journal 1

After you have completed this experiential process in your chosen place, write down whatever your awareness captured of this place. There is no correct pattern to follow as you write this; reflect on your experience, describe and capture through words, images, emotions, etc. Anything that engaged you as you invited your awareness to fully take in specifics of your chosen environment. Remember to allow time for direct engagement with place before writing and reflection, valuing your experience as well as the language used to describe it.
Bring the journal writing to class.

Discussion Topics

Periodically during your course, discuss:
What caused you to choose this place?
What are the most important aspects, qualities, details of your place?

What effects does this place have on you as you spend time there (relaxing, boredom, mind racing, creative juices flowing, reflection,