Dance

“Dance is vital, an activity both exhilarating and liberating to watch or do. The instinct to dance is fundamentally joyous and no matter how hard you try you can’t get away from that for long. It can also be a huge force for good, effectively drawing people together and levelling everyone through sheer hard work. It can speed up your heart rate, it can enliven your being, it can change your life.”

 Richard Alston CBE

Through studying Dance students learn and develop a range of physical, choreographic and performance skills in order to create, perform, respond to and evaluate dance. Students explore a range of styles, skills and stimuli through dance and broaden their understanding of movement.  As a physical activity it promotes fitness and well-being. As performers, students develop confidence, self-esteem and creativity. They develop self and body awareness as well as sensitivity to others, communication and team-working skills. As critics, students make informed decisions about the dances they see and develop their knowledge and understanding of the dance industry.

KS3 (Years 7-9)

Year 7

In Year 7 students will study dance through their PE curriculum and are introduced to a variety of dance skills, which form the basis for creating choreography, and develop their skills in creating, performing and responding. Students explore how dance has developed through different eras such as the 1920s Charleston and will gain an understanding of different stylistic features and performance skills. Students will use choreographic skills to create and perform their own motifs and evaluate the effectiveness of these.

Year 8

Students will study dance through their PE curriculum in order to extend and enhance skills learnt in Year 7. We will continue to develop the variety of skills and styles of dance learnt and use a number of stimuli to create dance. Students study and explore professional dance works and use these as inspiration to develop choreography and performance, as well as enhance their understanding of how dance is created.

Year 9

Year 9 provides an opportunity to embed skills learnt in Years 7 and 8. Dance is delivered through the Performing Arts rotation in Year 9 alongside drama, music and musical theatre. During their dance unit students will choreograph dance in response to a stimulus and use a range of choreographic devices to develop a performance. Students are encouraged to be creative, imaginative and express their own opinion on the given stimuli when choreographing, performing and evaluating performances.

KS4 (Years 10-11)

Year 10

In Year 10 students will explore the dance industry through the study of professional works, as part of their Component 1 written unit. In both theory and practical lessons, students will explore how the works were choreographed to demonstrate the creative intent effectively to an audience and how the different constituent features and practitioners contributed to this. In Component 2, students will also develop their dance skills and techniques further in rehearsal and performance through a range of technical and performance workshops, as well as replicate professional repertoire.

Year 11

In the first part of Year 11 students will continue to develop their dance skills and techniques through rehearsal of professional repertoire for Component 2, developing their technical, stylistic and interpretative skills. Students will perform this repertoire for assessment and reflect on their progress throughout the unit. Students will also choreograph a performance in response to an external brief. Students will research, create, rehearse and perform a dance piece which reflects the stimulus set for a target audience, as well as evaluate their choreographic process.