Last Monday, the Year 6 students participated in the first live, virtual visit by our dance specialist, Hilary Easton from New York. She taught us how to use basic dance steps to develop inventive rhythms and tones.
This lesson focuses on three specific tap dance steps: heel taps, during which one’s weight is on the ball of the foot to strike the floor with the heel; toes, which requires one’s weight to be on the other foot so that the sound can emanate from tapping the ball of the foot on the floor; and a whole-foot stamp (where the weight changes to the other foot) or stomp (where the weight does not change) which create sound from the full foot on the floor.
The students needed to be compassionate towards those who never experienced this type of dance before. We needed to be committed to the task as we faced a one-minute challenge to individually try out every possible rhythm we can think of that uses the movement of our assigned station and before we hear the signal that switches us to the following one. Click here to watch a video clip.
We enjoyed dancing along to the tunes of Duke Ellington and watching a few marvelous tap dancers improvise the rhythms like ones we tried to create. At the end of this lesson, Year 6s performed a contemporary Juilliard Flash Mob Dance that Hilary Easton, our dance specialist, choreographed in 2018.
By Iva Borisavljevic
Head of Performing Arts
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