Today we explored dancing with scarves using a mixture of different sized and coloured scarves.
We began by experimenting with what the smaller scarves could do to various music. Before making our very own scarf dance. I decided to base the scarf dance on cleaning a window. The participants were asked to create their own creative way to clean a window. Everyone came up with their own way to clean their imaginary window. Some were very detailed and really focuses on the movements you do when cleaning a window, where as others thought more about what movement would be most enjoyable to dance. We pieced each movement together, only altering them slightly so that we were able to link each movement together and danced to the most obvious song i could think of ‘When I’m cleaning windows’. Obviously our imaginary windows were spotless by the end of our dance. At the end of the dance we all threw our scarves up in the air and watched them float down.
We moved on to the big scarves. These are roughly 2 meters long and are in beautiful shimmery chiffon. Each is a different colour so we took some time choosing our scarf, either taking our favourite colour or matching them to our outfits. We then began to move. I joined each scarf up so that we were in a circle holding on to our scarf with our left hand and holding the person to our rights scarf in our right hand. As a group we thought of a few patterns we could make using the scarfs. We tried moving in and out, up and down and even passing a ripple around the circle. Before long we had 8 patterns to put together which included some more complex patterns.
We decided to put all the patterns into a dance routine, this time without the cleaning aspect! We danced to Glen Miller ‘In the mood’ which was chosen by one of the participants. Throughout the dance we did get a little muddled up at times but with the groups determination to get each pattern right we carried on until we were happy with our movements and patterns. We laughed and jokes and at the end we all smiled in relief as we were all worn out!
We had so much fun dancing with the scarfs some of the group even spoke about making their own scarfs so that they can continue the fun.
After very hot session we tucked into some fruit cookies brought by one of our participants and a well earned cup of tea!
What a lovely session!