by Jess Plewe
Objective: Students will physically experiment with different qualities of movement by engaging in Anne Bogart’s Viewpoints of Space (Spatial Relationship).
Standard L1.T.P.4: Use body to communicate meaning through space, shape, energy, and gesture.
Essential Questions
- How does the way we move convey meaning?
- Where does meaning in performance come from?
Enduring Understanding(s)
- Movement conveys meaning
- Artistic differences between symbolic and didactic movement
- The way we interact with time tells a story
Materials:
- 2 Hi-Chew candies
- The Student Spotlight Response Sheet
- Viewpoints of Time Quiz
Spotlight
- Pull up the Student Spotlight Responses Sheet and choose a student who has not been spotlighted yet.
- Without reading their name, go through all of their answers. After reading all their answers, have students guess which student is the spotlight for today. Once correctly guessed, give the guesser and the student spotlight one Hi-Chew each.
- Allow the class to ask a few questions of the student spotlight to get to know them better.
Warm up - Movement telephone
- Get all the students into a circle. Do a movement accompanied by a sound (ex: waving while saying Hello). Instruct the students that this movement and sound will be passed around the circle one by one. The goal of this activity is to copy the movement and sound of the person next to you as the activity goes on, which means that any slight change they make, you should also make.
- Play a few rounds, occasionally pausing the action and allowing a new movement and sound to be created.
Viewpoints of Time Review
Group Work
- Instruct the students to get into four groups
- Each group is given a Viewpoint of Time (Tempo, Duration, Kinesthetic Response, Repetition). All groups are given a location
- The groups must create characters and movement that plays with/changes/emphasizes the viewpoint they were given in the location they were assigned
- Give students 5-10 minutes to create a 30-second to 1-minute long performance.
Perform
- Call class back together.
- Each group will perform for each other, and give a short review about what their Viewpoint’s definition is.
- After each performance, students who observed the performance must respond with “I liked” “I noticed” “I wondered” about the performance to a partner
- After a few minutes of partner discussion, take comments for a whole class discussion
Assessment
- Instruct students to grab their Chrombooks and open up Canvas
- On the projector, show them where they can find the Viewpoints of Time quiz. Instruct them to take the quiz silently, and work quietly without distracting others once they finish.
Transition
- Say that now that we have explored Bogart’s Viewpoints of TIME, we are going to explore a different aspect of movement of her Viewpoints: SPACE! To begin exploring how space can tell a story, we are going to play a game that focuses on spatial relationships.
Dragon and Shield
- Each student must secretly choose one peer to be their dragon, and another peer to be their shield. The goal of the game is to keep your shield between you and your dragon at all times. At random moments, I will call “Freeze!” and everyone must stop moving. If your shield is not between you and your dragon, then you get burned by the fire, and must sit out until the end of the game.
- Complete a few practice rounds to get students in the hang of it, and to make sure students are moving safely
- Start the official game, eliminating students who were not protected by their shield, until around 4-5 students remain. They are the winners.
Discussion
Ask the students:
How does this game tell a story through space?
- The distance b/w characters?
What happened when you had to pick a new dragon/shield?
- How did the story change?
Viewpoint of Space #1
Instruction
Introduce Spatial Relationship viewpoint:
- Write it on the board with a simple definition: Spatial Relationship - The distance between characters can tell a story.
- Ask: How does changing this change a story?
Activity - Two on stage game.
Ask two students to stand on the stage. Direct the students to move to different parts of the stage, make different pictures, some that are interesting, some that are boring.
Debrief with the students, asking:
- What story could we apply to the movement just created?
- What images were interesting?
- What images were boring?
- If time, ask for three students on stage, do the same thing, (move as directed by me to different parts of the stage) and see how different dynamics are created when there are three people.