It was the first time I’d taught for the Demeric School of Dance after having left to train at Tring when I was sixteen and where I am now in my final year at London Contemporary School in London.
Teaching the Junior Workshops was a real pleasure. We did all sorts of dances including dances about seasons, sports, robots, shapes, circles and contact. They all worked really well and really quickly and within a few days each group had 2 dances that we merged into 1 for each group. They all performed brilliantly on the friday and their hard work payed off!
I had the pleasure of teaching a contemporary dance workshop with some lovely senior students. We started with a class which was about an hour, doing some travelling exercises to get them moving across the space etc. We did a big travelling jump at the end and they started at different sides of the room and crossed paths which they did very well! After a break I taught some partner contact work which they all picked up quickly! They tried the lifts and weight transfers and then pieced them together. We then learnt a phrase which there were no counts for and I put some music on. I asked them to start moving when they felt ready to do so, and not to worry to much about dancing together but instead feeling their own way through the movements. We then put the phrase with the partner work, and they improvised from the phrase into the contact work. In my attempts to create a cool atmosphere I turned the lights down and luckily we were in a great studio which had some very cool dim lights separate to the other lights, so we kept these on so they could still see each other but it wasn’t too bright! With the music loud and the lights dim the girls went in their partners so the others could watch, and then they went all together a last time. We had a little stretch together at the end, and a cool down. They all worked really hard. I really enjoyed teaching and hope that it was nice for the students to have a taste of another dance style!