Transformation

It's amazing.  You can start with a square...

Which can turn into a triangle....

Which can turn into a square again....

And then into another triangle...

And then, after just a little bit of cutting, you get this!

It's a little bit a magic, that!

(If you're interested, these perfect little paper squares [just over 3"x3"] were 500 sheets for $2.00 on special at...um....[staples]....in six bright colors and two softer shades.  I found them in the notepad section -- looks like sticky notes, but no sticky. Also, the particular fold I used comes from a little book on Kirigami I had lying around, and the cuts were improvisational after trying out some of patterns in the book.  I'm going to use these, and many others, to decorate my summer classrooms up in the city not to mention the walls of my own house!)

Linking to Saturday's Artist at Ordinary Life Magic. :-)

Give This a Try!

A student's illustration of his Jump Pattern A, at his own volition, no prompting.

Start in center.  Feet together.  Assume all four beats move on a Jump.

The first two beats work just fine as written.

In Beat 3 you are still facing forward, right and left foot are not labled, but the arrows give you a clue.

How far do you turn on Beat 4?

Can you do this pattern backwards (a reflection of the beat order, e.g. 4, 3, 2, 1)?

How else can you rearrange these four beats to make a different pattern?  Did it work?

Which combination of beats/moves did you like the best?

Ode to A Dance Board

LuAnne's dance board.  I am completely covetous.

My friend LuAnne recently started learning how to clog.  She had a friend make her a dance board so she could practice at home. 

Being the wonderful multi-talented artist that she is, she decorated it.  Now the board is magically practical.

My own board is not nearly as beautiful as LuAnne's.

In Math in Your Feet, children do their dancing and creative work inside taped 2'x2' squares that creates a similar dance space to the dance board that I use.  These boards are sometimes called step-a-tunes. 

At traditional fiddle festivals around the country, where old-time musicians gather in the summer, dancers often carry their step-a-tune around until they find a jam they like.  Then, they put down their board (in the dirt, in the mud, in the grass) and are able to join the music.

Here is LuAnne's recent ode to said dance board which I think perfectly celebrates this seemingly limited, yet completely freeing, dance space of the step-a-tune.  Enjoy!

The Power of Limits 1: Thinking Inside the Box

I have spent most of my dance life performing and teaching on a 3'x3' square dance platform.  For perspective's sake I should say that most cloggers, step dancers or tap dancers do not regularly work in such a small space.  For me, working within the confines of my dance board was born out of necessity and eventually influenced the course of my creative life as both an artist and a teacher.

Stephen Nachmanovitch, in his book Free Play: The Power of Improvisation in Life and the Arts, includes a chapter titled 'The Power of Limits.'  This post is the first in a series of articles, inspired by his chapter, exploring how limits not only enhance creative problem solving but are actually a requirement of such a process.  Creativity, and all the intense and surprising things that word implies, requires of us resourcefulness, flexibility, ingenuity, and the necessity to think outside the box. 

Which, in my case, meant staying in the box!

The particulars of my situation dictated that I needed to have a portable dance space.  When I was touring and performing with my band Cucanandy, many of the venues we played were not dance friendly, meaning they hosted bands on tiny, often carpeted or tile-over-cement stages in clubs or small auditoriums.  As a dancer whose feet were the percussion section, my dancing contributed to the overall musical experience of our show and the sound of my feet needed to be consistent every time I performed.  It's practically impossible to sound good on cement, plus it's really bad for the body.  So, I bartered dance lessons with a specialty carpenter who created a beautiful wooden dance platform with the capability of producing high end, mid-range and bass tones.  The design of the platform was in itself limited to whether or not it would fit into the back of a Toyota Corolla Hatchback, which just happened to be 3'x3'.

I didn't start dancing until my mid-20's which is another limit I have had to work with in the course of my career.  The reason I tell you this is that, compared to a child's learning process which is quite holistic, an adult learner often approaches new learning self-consciously; self-conscious in ways that both help and hinder.  Having learned percussive dance at a somewhat late age, I remember very clearly not knowing how to dance. 

For this reason, I remember perfectly the day when I realized the creative potential of working within the limits of my dance platform.  I had only been dancing for about four years, two of those years with a professional percussive dance troupe,  and was still quite new to percussive dance. I was listening to a song the band was working on and had no steps in my current repertoire that would work.  I remember looking down at the platform and noticing the outer edges of my space which I normally avoided because I didn't want to fall off.  I remember thinking -- look at all the different directions I can go in.  This insight inspired and generated a whole new set of dance steps and, eventually, the final choreography for the piece.

There is more to the story but suffice it to say that moment eventually led me to creating Math in Your Feet, where students, with a basic vocabulary of percussive dance movements, do creative work within the limits of their own square dance spaces while making meaningful connections to mathematical topics.

See you again soon with another installment of The Power of Limits.  Be you artist, parent, teacher, or friend (or anyone else!) I'd love to hear your thoughts on this topic, so please consider leaving a comment. 

School Lunch

Each food plopped by tongs or spatula
Into its own little space --
Square pizza here, square brownie there;
Milk carton cube, rectangle tray.

My snack at home after school?
Anything without corners.

From the book Sijo (Poems) by Linda Sue Park

What You Can Learn from A Square

What can you learn from a square?  Well, before you can learn from a square you first have to understand it.  And, to do that, it's best for you to have a chance experience 'squareness' using use all your SENSES.  As Albert Einstein said:

"Learning is experience.  Everything else is just information."

To start, you need to SEE it.  You've probably been looking at squares all your life.  You can correctly identify a square and find examples of it in your environment.  But do you really understand it? 

Possibly.  You might be able to give some facts about a square (number of sides, number of vertices, measurment of angles, etc.) You may even be able to draw one or all four of the lines of symmetry through square.  But if you're a fourth grader being asked to make your body execute a move on the diagonal (opposite corners), it's actually pretty hard for you to do that without a visual reference.  That's where tape comes in. 

So, LOOK AT your taped 2'x2' square on the floor and sit inside it.  Use your fingers to TOUCH and TRACE the parallel sides, the vertices, and the equilateral sides.  TOUCH the directions forward, back, left, right and all the diagonals, and while you do this SAY the words that identify where you're touching. 

By now, it's probably safe to say that you are oriented to your two-dimensional dance space.  It's also likely that you have become inordinately fond of this little piece of property you call "home" and are unwilling to let anyone usurp your territory.  Ah, to be nine again.  No matter, it's all good.

It's also time to count up how many SENSES you've used so far to further your understanding of  'squareness.'  Let's see -- seeing, hearing, and touching.  There's actually one more sense you need to use and it's not smelling or tasting.   It's your VESTIBULAR SYSTEM.  Carla Hannaford in Smart Moves: Why Learning is Not All in Your Head puts it this way:

"...just as important to our development and our lives is the integration of sensory input, which gives us information about gravity and motion, and about our body's muscular movements and position in space -- the vestibular system and proprioception.  These play a surprisingly significant role in our awareness of the world and also...in our ability to understand and learn."

Okay, so now it's time to STAND UP and utilize your body for some high powered learning.  Put your FEET TOGETHER and STAND in the center of your space.  JUMP forward, JUMP center, JUMP back, JUMP center.  SPLIT your feet to the sides of the square.  SPLIT your feet to the diagonals.  TURN your body right, towards the first side.  TURN toward the next side.  TURN toward the third side.  TURN toward the fourth side.  How many times did you have to TURN to get all the way around?  How far, in fractions, did you JUMP on each turn?  How far was each turn in degrees? 

If you JUMP and TURN half way around your square, how far have you gone?  How many jumps will you need to get all the way around?  If you start your movements facing forward, JUMP and TURN 90 degress to the right and then JUMP and TURN 180 degrees to the left, where will you end up?

Are you learning anything new from a square yet?

Teaching Below the Surface: Harnessing the Power of Tape!

In earlier posts I espoused my enthusiasm for using simple floor tape to manipulate an environment and encourage physical exploration of that environment.  It's a powerful tool for teaching below the surface, something that makes a bigger impact when you don't talk about it because it's just there.  The Reggio Emilia approach says that environment is the third teacher and I have found this to be true in my work.  How I set up a learning environment can have a large impact on the students, and I have pictures to prove it!

In my work with elementary students we have a group dancing time to warm up and learn clogging, a little each day until they have some mastery of basic steps by the end of the week.  The bulk of our class time, however, is spent with partners engaged in creative work.  This effort is done in what I call a 'personal dance space': a scaled down version of the portable square dance platform on which I teach and perform.  Mine is wood, theirs are tape.  Mine is brown, theirs are blue.  Mine is three dimensional, theirs is two dimensional. Mine is 3'x3' and theirs are 2'x2'.  Did I mention I love floor tape?

On the first day we work exclusively as a large group and the tape on the floor in our dance space is a simple three-sided rectangle.  The kids line up with their toes on the tape and face toward the center of the space.  This way everyone can see me and what my feet are doing.  By the second day of our work together I've managed to tape out about 15 pairs of blue dance spaces.  Inevitably, on that day the kids walk into the room and, knowing nothing about what is going to happen in our class later, they go directly to a box and sit down.  I have to redirect them to the large-group perimeter tape but there's something about having a space of one's own, and these boxes just pull them in.

We never talk about the set up of the room, but since we focus quite a bit on transformation and symmetry in this program I try my best to make sure that, if asked, I can draw an accurate line of symmetry down the middle of our dance space.  So, without further ado, here are some drawings done by fourth graders as part of a Thank You letter project their teacher had them complete at the end of the residency.  No one told them what to draw.

I'm obviously very welcoming!  This was drawn from memory, back in her regular classroom. 
Notice the basic symmetry of the space. 

This isn't exactly what the room looks like (not enough squares), but you can draw a perfect line of symmetry from top to bottom of this picture.

One of the other 'below the surface' learning tools in the program is that working with a friend and sharing ideas can lead to amazing results.  Not only are these two girls dancing together (and smiling), they're dancing in a space delineated by blue tape!