Featured Guest: Susan H. Gingrasso, MA, CMA, is a dynamic and influential figure in dance education. Susan developed the dance major at the University of Wisconsin Stevens Point, leading the program to national prominence as program head. Her dedication to fostering interdisciplinary relationships and implementing a student-centered approach to dance education earned her the prestigious National Dance Education Organization’s Dance Educator award in 2006. View Susan's session!
K-5 teachers will play with, learn, and practice strategies that incorporate Language of Dance (LOD) as a teaching tool for English, Math, and Science. Dance Teaching Artists will use Language of Dance (LOD) Pedagogy to further develop dance literacy through composition, technique, observation, and analysis.
Join Australia’s Language of Dance® Master Practitioner, Natalie Diggins, for a thoroughly enjoyable movement masterclass that will give you simple, concrete, tools that are immediately applicable to your classes. Fantastic for monologue work, terrific for groups; the big movement concepts of Motion, Destination, and Stillness will give you a world of options for movement, characterisation, improvisation, devising, and text interpretation. Let’s play!
Dr. Ann Hutchinson Guest’s research led her to develop the Language of Dance, integrating literacy with dance and boosting students’ creativity in movement. In 1983, Dr. Hutchinson Guest copyrighted the Movement Alphabet, symbols representing verbs of human movement, interpreted in each mover’s own style. As such, the Language of Dance inherently allows for inclusive dance classrooms with multiple means of exploration. This session presents a unique curriculum developed for 5K-8 students to embody the difference between their whole body moving versus a body area. The curriculum demonstrates that the Movement Alphabet (verbs) is supported with more detail when the parts of the body (nouns) are explored and notated. Students’ develop an understanding of how their body moves as they are provided with vast choice in creating movement. Continuing to grow the roots of the Language of Dance, this curriculum also encompasses the Literary Processes as described by Dr. Teresa Heiland in her research. Specifically, this curriculum guides students to: identify the LOD movement alphabet with whole/sections body symbols; create an LOD score with the movement alphabet and whole/sections body symbols; and interpret a written score and translate into movement. This session will impart participants with knowledge to guide their students through this specific unit of study or to create their own curriculum that employs LOD principals discussed and explored during this presentation. Further information will be provided for those participants who are interested in rising to learn more about Foundations certification through the Language of Dance Center.
These two full-day PDs provide teachers with deeper understanding and skills to further develop students’ creativity, literacy, and critical thinking in dance. Teachers experience and practice strategies to: Support their students’ ability to engage in rigorous artistic inquiry through Literacy Processes of sensing, reflecting, observing, identifying, interpreting, writing dance, and creating original dances.
Use dance language skills of dancing, listening, speaking, viewing, reading, & notating/writing.
Engage diverse populations by honoring participants’ individual expression, identities, and cultural backgrounds by exploring, improvising, & composing through Culturally Responsive dance learning.
Highlight inter- and intrapersonal SEL opportunities in the LOD Approach.
Identify and practice various points of entry and access that are essential for Multilingual Learners’ success in a dance class.
The Fulbright Specialist Program requires individuals be able to effectively share their knowledge and skills in a cross-cultural setting. Michael taught LOD to 14 groups at 6 universities and 2 schools in 3 cities in Brazil via funding from the Fulbright program and the local universities. All classes were huge successes with so much new choreography created and performed by all. One group performed their work in the subway and at the Latin American Memorial in Sao Paulo.
Michael worked with performing arts undergrads and grad students, researchers, professional dancers, professors from many departments, current and future classroom teachers, elementary school students, and school administrators. He also developed notation to express experiences inspired by sensory awareness and curriculum in motion (dancing dialogic inquiry). Students eagerly responded to LOD and are ready to host foundations in Brazil! Michael is proud to say this was “One of the most gratifying professional experiences of my life.”
Join us to explore our dance language-one concept, one Motif symbol at a time! Dive into dancing and creating in our Language of Dance® (LOD) Composition class! Rediscover familiar dance movement concepts through Motif symbols while improvising, composing, and collaborating with partners. This class fosters your curiosity, playfulness, and shared discovery about dance. As we learn and grow together through dancing, we grow our voice, our community. For all ages, this workshop celebrates dance, language, and connecting. Come ready to move, create, and inspire one another!
Dr. Ann Hutchinson Guest, a renowned figure in the world of dance, developed Language of Dance®, a pedagogical approach that builds movement knowledge and develops movement literacy. The foundation of this approach is the Movement Alphabet, the principal verbs of our body’s movement. We will engage with the Movement Alphabet as an entry point into Language of Dance, experiencing these primary actions as a catalyst for the creative process and as an effective and efficient way to build and deepen movement skills. Participants will dance the Movement Alphabet to discover how sensing focuses kinesthetic awareness to reveal the range of ideas inherent in each concept. Exploring these concepts we connect to figurative and descriptive language to heighten the moving experience. Tapping into their exploratory movement reservoir, participants will write and dance their own Motif Notation scores using the Movement Alphabet symbols. Participants will improvise their Motif Notation scores and discover how that differs from dancing specific choices for each concept. In this process, we will discuss ways that writing and dancing scores nurtures inclusivity, self-efficacy, and culturally relevant learning. Guest felt that the Movement Alphabet and Language of Dance were her most important contributions to the field of dance. With this session, and others to come, we honor her legacy and keep this innovative and most relevant approach alive and growing in our dance spaces.
Engaging with dance through documentation strategies can foster multiple opportunities for meaning-making and support artists to describe, analyze, and reflect on dance and save their work in tangible forms. The revised NC Dance Standards include documentation as part of the Creating strand wherein learners will use different approaches to represent aspects of the dances they create, perform, and observe.
Participants will experience using the Language of Dance, an embodied, artistic approach to dance literacy that incorporates a set of symbols–Motif Notation–to represent movement concepts. We will explore the LOD Movement Alphabet through improvisation and composition and then apply notation to document the dances we create. We will then reflect on our learning and applications to classroom practice across grade levels.