Hello! I’m Marie, one of the SDD Primary School Programme Dance
Artists. I mainly work on Extend It which is our professional development
programme for teachers. Our approach offers teachers creative methods for
advancing and enriching the learning and engagement of their pupils. We use
movement and choreography to open up lines of enquiry in other curriculum
areas, incorporating the ‘Philosophy for Children’ approach
Choreography is at the heart of our workshops and we always use
the professional work of Siobhan Davies Dance as a starting point for our
planning. Last term I delivered a number of workshops for Primary PGCE students
at the Institute of Education and London South Bank University. These workshops
used sculpture and senses as a theme and provided solid links to the Art &
Design and Science curriculum. These inquisitive and reflective students were
an absolute pleasure to work with. I was inspired by their enthusiastic and
curious approach to the workshops and am excited that these teachers of the future
are so keen to celebrate kinaesthetic learning both in the classroom and the
hall space!
Yesterday I delivered an Extend It workshop called The Thinking
Body at the Barbican. This was part of Siobhan Davies Dance’s new work material
/ rearranged / to / be, an installation of live performance, film projection
and sculptural objects exploring how the body and mind work together to
communicate through action and gesture. 14 teachers
from a variety of primary schools across London attended the twilight workshop
and all arrived with a burst of fresh, joyful energy.
The workshop started with a visit to the installation where I
gave the teachers a series of tasks to complete such collecting gestures and
finding particular images and text. They came back to the dance studio with a
thoughtful and questioning state of mind. We discussed their experience and I
was encouraged to hear about all of the connections they observed between mind
and body and non-verbal communication. I explained that the work is inspired by
the art historian Aby Warburg’s practice of gathering and arranging images to
reveal new meanings and the works featured in the installation inhabit an
ever-changing arrangement, so their experience of the installation will be
different with every view. We then did a two hour practical workshop that
explored The Thinking Body practically. We used all of the collected gestures
and explored the images and text through a clearly structured lesson using the
Siobhan Davies Dance methodology. We also looked at some sensory and curriculum
based activities.
I was amazed by the teachers energetic, open-minded and creative
approach to all of the activities and the work produced as a result was so
rich. I am looking forward to hearing about their experiences of trying the
activities in their schools and am hoping that the experience inspires them to
continue to investigate with their pupils the fascinatingly complex world of
the body and mind.
