Monday Morning Joys

Last Monday, March 2, Bal Malhada had the opportunity to go to Richland Upper Elementary School for their Read Across America event. At 9:00 on a rainy morning, 200 third graders crowded into the school's cafeteria with us, and sat down expectantly. We smiled when we heard whispers of "look, high schoolers!" before their teachers told them that we were actually in college. As we tried to warm up our cold toes, Ms. Morton prayed with us, that even though we were presenting in an educational outreach performance, that we would still impact the lives of these young children.

Dancing in ballet shoes on a tiled cafeteria floor, with tables grouped around our open space, we began by performing three pieces from our collective repertoire of dance works. After showing these pieces, we presented a poem, entitled, "Michael Built a Bicycle"; the first time, we read the poem by itself, and then we repeated it to the accompaniment of movement, to see if the students could remember more details of the story. Following this, we used our bodies to create the letters of the alphabet, working through the book "M is for Mississippi".

Performing the piece "Mighty Spirit", choreographed by Cynthia Newland

We then asked the students to stand up and move with us, beginning with an interactive warm up to connect their brain and body movements. We taught them to use various body parts to write their names in space (finger, elbow, nose, etc.) with different types of lettering (print, cursive, uppercase, lowercase, big, small), before creating some of the simpler alphabet shapes with them.

Using our elbows to write our names in space

To conclude, we used dance to show different parts of a story: characters, setting, plot, conflict, and resolution. We had previously asked the students for different ideas for each story component, and the result was very creative: Superman and Aquaman in New York City saving a woman and her cat from a burning building. We had created a dance/pantomime to portray this story, and had the children guess as to what had been happening. Their responses were inventive and usually close, if not exact. One boy, who clearly had extensive comic book knowledge, figured out the identities of both superheroes, before guessing that we were in Gotham. Many students, when first seeing the woman and her cat going for a walk, exclaimed "kitty!" before we heard one young man, upon seeing Grace, who was the cat, quietly say "pretty...". After we were finished, we heard another student say emphatically, "This is ART."

And so it was. Sometimes we tend think of art as something which must be at a higher level, slightly out of reach, almost unattainable. But for these students, even in the simplicity of our performance and interactive explorations, we had shown them a new type of art. We had opened doors for them to understand movement and dance - that it could be used for the higher, beautiful truths, as well as the simpler, everyday ones. Just as Ms. Morton had prayed in the beginning, we had an impact on these students, even as they impacted us. We helped them to discover art, and they helped us to remember the simple joy that inspires our art in the first place.