Today we explored plates!
As the participants arrived eager to dance they noticed several piles of paper plates on my table. To some of the groups disappointment we weren’t having a buffet we were going to use them to move!
After warming up I took the plates out and place 4 on the floor space in front of each participant. I used 4 different colours, Pink at the front, Green to the Left, Yellow to the Right and Blue at the back. I asked them what they thought we were going to do and it wasn’t long before they had guessed it! We were going to use the plates as a dance mat- ‘Just like in the arcades’ one lady replied. After passing around a few found memories of the arcades and children/ grand-children playing on the dance mats we began to move.
For my first task I would say different colour combinations and the group would tap them out. I tried to give longer and longer combinations each time to test their memories.
I then took two away, and asked the participants to place their feet on the plates that were left over. We then began to learn a phrase that involved sliding the plates. Almost like ski’s! What a work out!
With the plates still resting under the participants feet I asked them to imagine the plates had paint on the bottom and they were to paint a picture using their feet. This was wonderful. We’d done this exercise with our hands before but not our feet. The focus was amazing and all had forgot that actually they were working their bodies (legs and core in particular) very hard!
After working our bottom half rather hard we decided to move on to move on to the main activity. Greek plate dancing!
For this I gave each participant a gold paper plate and another paper plate of their choice. As a group we learnt a few basic Greek plate dancing steps. We then tried them to music- traditional music! For those that aren’t aware Greek plate dancing music traditionally builds in speed. It gets faster, and faster and faster! And that’s just what we did! The group were worn out by the end but each still retained their smiles throughout as we had so much fun dancing together- even when we did get it slightly wrong!
I then asked the group to pair up and make on final movement to represent the plate smashing (as in traditional Greek plate dancing). The ideas were wonderful and each pair created something completely different. It was also great to see the group thinking outside the box and moving with new people.
We decided to share this dance with each other one last time before finally cooling down using some much gentler Thai-chi.
What a week! What a work out! and what a creative fun filled session!