Hip Hop Dance Festival at PS 165 in Flushing, Queens
Last night I saw a wonderful hip hop dance festival and celebration at PS 165 in Flushing, Queens.
Kathleen Isaac, a dance teacher at PS 165 organized the program, which featured performances by more then 25 groups of kids--mostly 3rd-5th graders but a few younger children as well. The kids performed to a packed auditorium of students and their parents.
For me the best part of the program was simply enjoying the creativity, commitment and energy of the kids.
There were a huge number of people shooting video and taking pictures. So hopefully I'll soon have some multimedia content to add to this post.
On the topic of new media, I'd like to hear from dance teachers and others who work with kids and dance. I'm especially interested in how you are integrating video, online publishing applications, social media and related tools and software into your projects.
Here's a quote from Sabine Klaus who wrote a post yesterday on dance-tech.net about her work with kids on a screen dance project:
...what absolutely positively surprised me was that when we showed them [kids] some DVDs as part of the introduction to screendance they absolutely understood how the digital effects were done and could even explain most of them. Wow, the next generation grows up with such a different understanding and approach to the digital world! But saying this, the group of youngsters made very quickly clear to us that although they enjoy watching the dance scenes from "Step Up", they actually want to get up and make their own and be active rather than passively sit around and stare at a screen. I love this!
Do you have similar stories? Please share. Thanks!
Posted by
Doug Fox on April 8, 2009 5:50 AM
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6 Comments
Hi, I'm from P.s.165Q. (From Sweet N' Sassy) I want to say thank you for coming and for posting this up.
Thank you. XD
I work as a teaching artist, and I've been challenging myself this school year to apply the same creative process in the classroom as I do with my own art. One thing I do is regularly video works-in-progress on my Flip camera and post them to Vimeo, so they can a) serve as a reference to me to look at outside of the studio and allow me to "edit" and b) serve as an audience interaction tool, so they are familiar with my process even though they aren't in the studio.
Anyway, I've been using this same strategy with my students, and Urban Arts Partnership, where I teach one of my residencies, has blogs to display these works-in-progress: http://www.urbanarts.org/blogs/view/9
I have a lot of footage, but unfortunately, not all of my students' parents have signed the obligatory photo release. I'm working on that...
Hi Sarah,
I'm glad you shared your dance education experiences working with kids and new media. I visited your Urban Arts Partnership videos after you tweeted about them and enjoyed seeing your program in action:
http://www.urbanarts.org/blogs/view/9
Getting permission/releases from parents is definitely important when it comes to posting videos and pictures. I wounder how many teachers and schools do this?
Hi Sinai,
It was great to see you and your fellow students dance Tuesday night! Lots of energy and creativity.
And thanks for posting a comment on Great Dance.
It was a great night on April 7. MRS. ISAAC, you're the best and the most wonderful teacher I ever had. I LOOOOOOVVVVE HIIIIIIP HHHHOP!
hi do you remember my crew the nockouts we were the first dance and i would like to thank you so much for posting up this great text and again thank you.
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