K-12: Taking Dance into Schools

By the time her students have changed out of their Catholic school uniforms and entered the studio, Nicole Tipton Tallent is often left with only 35 minutes to teach her high school dance class at St. Joseph’s Academy in St. Louis, Missouri. Faced with three 45-minute classes and one 75-minute class per week, the greatest struggle is structuring the ballet unit for her shorter periods—half the time of a standard ballet class. “There are all these elements at barre, plus center practice and a combination across the floor,” she says.

It’s your first day at a new school. You’ve gone over your lesson plan and moved the desks out of the way. Now, you’re staring at a sea of young faces, several of whom—mostly the boys—are eyeing you warily.
 

In the 1980s, Minnesota governor Rudy Perpich and his wife Lola dreamed of creating a performing arts school, à la the “Fame” high school in New York City. Because they also wanted to make arts resources available to teachers across the state, the school became part of an ambitious multipurpose center for arts education in all disciplines. Today, the Perpich Center for Arts Education is a high school, a library and a clearinghouse of tools for arts educators nationwide.
 

After three months of silence,  school classrooms and hallways will soon be filled with energetic young bodies. For dance teachers, this time of year brings instant momentum and creative potential, but it’s also a vital and delicate time when you must lay a good foundation for the year ahead. Below, three veterans share their tips on getting the best start.
 
DEB MATA
 

Of course, dancers use their feet. But can you imagine movement that only uses the feet? What about an entire dance where the performers only use their hands? How do the hands and feet instigate larger movements? These are the kinds of questions guiding the structured improvisations of dance students at Newark Academy, a private middle and high school in Livingston, New Jersey, and one of 1,300 schools across the country certified to participate in one of the International Baccalaureate’s (IB) programs.
 

“Let’s do the Mr. Wiggles combination that we’ve been practicing,” says Jamee Schleifer to a room of eager fourth- and fifth-grade students. Out of her 25 classes at PS 253—The Magnet School of Multicultural Humanities—Schleifer has handpicked these 20 students to join The Dance Club, which meets for 30 minutes on Friday afternoons. The soft-spoken teacher sports Adidas pants, a T-shirt, hoop earrings and a chained cuff, and she gets on her students’ level, joking with them as she demonstrates fresh hip-hop moves.

Busy teachers are always looking for ways to enrich curriculum, and adding dance is a great option. But it can be daunting for a teacher to come up with movement-oriented lessons on her own. The Luna Dance Institute’s (LDI) annual summer workshop, held at Mills College in Oakland, California, pairs six dance artists with six classroom teachers for a six-day intensive.

At 7:45 am on a Wednesday, Lisa Clark’s classroom is flooded with sunlight and filled with nearly 20 freshmen. The students—all of whom are at Clark’s optional “zero period” open rehearsal—are practicing a piece about a pack of lionesses hunting a phoenix. Leaping and running in a large circle around her, the students concentrate on perfecting their arm placement and pointing their toes as they spring forward, trying to avoid colliding with one another. “I love it when you figure it out for yourself!” Clark cheers.
 

In fall 2008, Ellen Keane walked into North End Elementary School in a low-income area of St. Paul, Minnesota, with a mission to teach tap to kids who couldn’t afford lessons. The principal at the time, Hamilton Bell, embraced the idea. “He was thrilled when I said that I wanted to write a grant in order to launch a tap program at his school,” Keane says. 
 

With a ready and relaxed smile, Lakshmanath Raju Sawak—Raju to his friends—seems remarkably composed, well beyond his 10 years. Just days before he makes his professional debut as the adorable little mouse in American Ballet Theatre’s new Nutcracker, he’s handling an interview with aplomb. “I decided to try ballet because it’s something I had never done before,” he says matter-of-factly. But Raju’s introduction to ballet was slightly unconventional. It began when American Ballet Theatre’s outreach program came to his elementary school.