The Dance / Culture Connection
Residency for 5th and/or 6th Graders
“Culture is built on ideas, beliefs, and things that individuals
in a group hold as important.”
— Dr. David Parker
In this residency, I use dance to build students’ fluency with the concept of culture. Whenever possible, the students and I briefly touch on how their choices and behavior are affected by this definition of “culture” on a moment-to-moment and daily basis.
After a week of workshops, this residency concludes with a performance for an audience of parents, teachers, and fellow students in their school community.
During This Week-Long Residency Students Will:
- Learn and master simplified versions of traditional dances from four very different parts of the world: sub-Saharan Africa, Greece, Ireland, and Broadway.
- Learn, memorize, choreograph, recite, and perform the definition of culture.
- Engage in brief conversations to explore what these dances reveal about the cultures they come from.
- Experience the rewards of going to their “edge” (i.e., using all their energy and doing their best, without fear of making mistakes) and performing for their parents and school community.
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For Teachers
Deeper Implications of the Dance/Culture Connection
For as long as I can remember, I’ve been curious about the dance/culture connection. Traditional dances reflect and represent the cultures that spawned them and they do this with remarkable specificity. In other words, the combination of many elements — the music and the musicality of the movements, the energy output of the dancers, the rhythms, spacing, and formations in the dance (i.e., how the dancers move in and out of relationship to each other), etc. —ensures that each traditional dance is unlike any other, yet alike it terms of that unique specificity.
As I watched these dances and analyzed my own reaction to them, it became equally obvious to me that these dances reflect and represent the absolute best aspects of their cultures; individuals in a group getting together to reinforce and celebrate their connection. I also noticed that, as a spectator, I did not feel excluded from this connection; I reveled in it.
This revelation ignited an irrepressible curiosity about the specificity of the dance/culture connection. I wondered if specific elements of the dance revealed something unique and universal about that particular culture and if this connection between the two was, in fact, my own original, visceral connection to various cultures.
To answer this question, I needed to find a working definition of culture. For months, all I did was read various definitions of culture. None of these definitions provided insights into the genesis or the nature of a traditional dance. Then I stumbled upon the definition quoted at the top of this course description. The last phrase proved critical to my investigation:
“ . . . that individuals in a group hold as important."
I reasoned that the most important thing for all people and peoples is to survive that an individual’s survival depends on belonging to a group, and that the group’s survival depends on the specific contribution of each individual within that group. In effect, each individual is predisposed to stand apart from one’s group in a way that makes that group stronger, more self-sufficient, and better fortified against the forces that threaten it.
Therefore, “the ideas, beliefs, and things that individuals in a group hold as important” depend on three basic relationships:
The individual’s relationship to one’s environment.
The individual’s relationship to one’s group.
The individual’s relationship to oneself.
Traditional dances clearly show the unique dynamic of relationships that the individual upholds to survive and thrive in these contexts.
I look forward to dancing with your students. I am quite confident that the visceral experience of learning and performing these dances will give your students a deeper sense of connection to themselves, each other, and the school that brings them together.
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Related Organizations:
The National Dance Institute offers excellent teacher training courses. I highly recommended this course for all teachers; not only dance teachers.
The Vanaver Caravan is an invaluable resource for in-depth studies of the dance/culture connection.
Related Reading:
Dance: Rituals of Experience by Jamake Highwater
Migrations of Gesture by Carrie Noland and Sally Ann Ness
Agency and Embodiment: Performing Gestures/Producing Culture by Carrie Noland
The Shapes of Change by Marcia B. Siegel
Body Movement and Culture: Kinesthetic and Visual Symbolism in a Philippine Community by Sally Ann Ness