Wednesday, June 14, 2006

Beautiful Dancers

Tonight was the dance recital for my little dance class. They were beautiful. It was an amazing performance and I was so proud of them. And it was truly in 'creative movement' style. In class we have spent lots of time doing free dancing - listening to music, thinking about it, interpretting it. And our recital was just like that. I let them pick what character they wanted to be and then Bozenka and I created the story (mostly Bozenka - I just came up with the outline) from the characters they chose (1 princess, 1 tiger and 5 fairies). I spent many hours coming up with the music and getting it all burned onto one CD. Today I was at the school from 12:30 on, setting it up and decorating. Two of the moms, my friends, came and helped me 'magic-ify' the room. It was beautiful. I brought lamps from home to get rid of the gross overhead lighting and make it feel more like a stage. Bozenka came and read the story. It was so magical. They danced out a whole story - a total of 9 dances - it took about 30 minutes. My 7 little dancers were magificent. They improvised on the spot.

My philosophy about dance is that dancing for most is a natural out-pouring. And young children don't need someone to tell them what to do or how to dance. Left to their own creativity, they made an amazing dance. For me to tell them to do what they did naturally, it would have taken months of rehearsals and all the fun would have been out of it. I feel so priviledged to have been a small part of their dancing.

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