ECELA Year 3 Toolkit for Coaches & Teachers

Watch Paul Taylor’s Esplanade video and look for examples of time and its attributes of rhythm, tempo, accent, duration and pattern.

After your discussion, have students clap on a beat (you can do this with or without music.) Using counts of eight, first have the students count out loud with you. Next, they can just clap on the beat while you count. Eventually, drop the counting and you can just clap on the beat.

From clapping to find the beat, you can expand to moving on this beat. Using either locomotor (movements that travel) or axial movements (movement that stays in one place), guide a simple movement that students can do while you clap the beat for them. As students excel, you can make changes to the beat to create a more complicated rhythm and have students add more elaborate movements to follow/stay on the rhythm.

As in the previous lesson, a note-taking guide is provided here. It provides all students with a way to focus their observations, holding individual students accountable for viewing actively (ELD Standards Part I), while at the same time, offering scaffolds for students to gain a deeper understanding of the technical dance vocabulary that is the focus of this lesson. After students have completed all or portions of the note-taking guide, they can then share their guides with other students to enhance and clarify their own understandings and simultaneously, have an structured opportunity for oral academic language practice.

When sharing out, English Learners might better use academic language if they are provided with some basic sentence frames, such as these:

1. The tempo of this dance created a feeling of ________.
2. I noticed a pattern of __________, which made me think of _________.
3. The accents of _____ in this dance provided a transition from _____ to ____.

All dance movements fall into one of two categories: axial or locomotor.  The dancer moves with the element of dance called ACTION. These can be movements that stay in place (axial) or movements that travel (locomotor).  

Axial movements are movements taking place around the axis of a dancer’s body. Axial movements are also referred to as non-locomotor movements. The latter term is used to clarify the fact that some movements transfer a dancer from one place to another, but axial or non-locomotor movements have little to no movement of the body's base of support. As an example, think about twisting your body around an imaginary "axis" that runs from your head to your feet, while keeping your feet planted in one spot. That is non-locomotor. Other examples of axial and non-locomotor movements include bending, stretching, reaching, twisting, turning, and gesturing.

In this module, the term axial will be used for simplicity.

Locomotor movements are characterized by the dancer traveling from one location to another. Examples include: walking, running, hopping, leaping, galloping, sliding, jumping, and skipping.

To engage in, create, or read dance requires the ability to use, do, and identify axial and locomotor movements. By combining axial with locomotor movements, both novice and professional dancers and choreographers communicate with the audience and make dances more interesting to watch.

The strategy used after each video in this lesson, where a video is viewed more than one time with each viewing having a different focus, is called "Viewing Closely," and is addressed in the ELD Standards, Part I, Standard 6: Reading closely literary and informational texts and viewing multimedia to determine how meaning is conveyed explicitly and implicitly through language. Just as a rich text deserves to be read more than once, so does a rich or compelling dance. The first viewing serves to draw the viewer into the dance, allowing them to savor it without any outside commentary influencing the impact it might have on them. Subsequent viewings each have a different focus, drawing the viewer deeper into the dance and helping them discover aspects of the dance that make it effective.