Dance

Dance is delivered in three disciplines – performance, choreography, and understanding and appreciation.

The three disciplines are taught and developed together with the aim to build personal skills that students can draw upon to succeed, not only in Dance but beyond the curriculum and in future employment. Students are encouraged to assess and evaluate their own work and work of others and develop plans to enhance performance and review progress. They are also provided with analytical skills enabling them to critique movement and production features of professional work.

Whilst in Dance we gain the knowledge of choreographic processes, performance skills and production features, also at the heart of the subject are such skills as engagement, communication and projection, creative imagination, leadership, confidence and commitment. Opportunities are embedded for students to be able to hone and develop performance talent but equally important is the ability to understand the purpose of dance we create. Approaches of choreographers are introduced throughout the key stages to enable students not only to recreate but to shape their own unique ideas with a greater understanding of the need for style, intention, stimuli and to learn to celebrate individual and unique perspectives.

Students study production features including costume, set design, lighting, and aural setting. They use this knowledge as well as the given stimuli and choreographic intentions, to analyse a number of dances in different styles. This allows students the opportunity to create multiple interpretations for the choices made and to use this knowledge to ask further questions to enhance their own creativity.