Describe the process. How did I choose the project? Why did I choose this method?
Since my background in teaching is usually teaching on apparatus like pole or aerial silks, I knew that I wanted to incorporate one of that with my FFTT Final Project. For the longest time, I had also wanted to teach a Pole Flow loop with a skill, but I was stuck on how to do it.
I am also currently handling our chair dance class called HOT SEAT. This class is a very straightforward choreography class - we learn some tricks on a chair, learn a dance, and end the class with the dance and tricks.
I wanted to teach my new choreography set a little differently. I thought of incorporating FFTT techniques to the chair, and treating the chair as our floor or apparatus - helping students become more aware of moving with this in the coming weeks. This current choreography set is also part of our pole school’s online student showcase. We will be practicing this over time, and performing it, but continuing to do so online (students won’t see or meet one another besides in online class, so I needed a way to ensure that we were all on the same page about the movement, and that we still embraced the concept of the dance as one). So I thought with this exercise, (and I plan to open every class with this exercise), would be a good way to apply what I learned in FFTT to my current teaching, as well as help my students become more aware of their movement on our current apparatus - the chair.
What felt good and provided a healthy challenge in creating this project?
One of the most challenging aspects of the whole FFTT experience for me, was not to “peacock” or demonstrate doing the dance steps myself, while prioritizing the aesthetic of the movement, rather than my own breath and awareness. At the same time, I want to encourage that awareness of movement in my students (and not only the aesthetic quality of what we do), with this exercise. For that reason, I tried to stay off the chair as much as I could, until I felt the students may have needed a bit more visual guidance. I also tried to give more verbs as cues for movement and actions rather than body part placement. This is still a very conscious change in mindset for me, but I try to be more aware of it in all my classes, not only this one!
This type of warm up is also not our conventional way to start a class. Trying to get my students on the same mental page as I was (when they were probably expecting something more technical), was also a bit of a challenge to think about. I am grateful for the trust they gave me to take part in the warm up in this and in this exercise! They gave their content in this recording and that it would be uploaded for viewing in our class.
What do you think your final project offers to the viewer or participant?
For the students, I think it offered a different way to think of our movement or choreography, rather than body part placement at a certain count (which, I admit, is still a way I catch myself thinking about dances). I hope that it helped them absorb the concept behind our dance a bit more, and will help everyone embrace the choreography in that way. In this way, I also hope that they are able to find their own way of portraying the choreography, that is not only technical but sincere - that they feel the beats and movement in the song, and want to show it to the audience.
If there is one thing you would do differently, what would it be?
I think I would also like to try to create a loop with the chair. I think I had the beginnings of a loop in the first part, but didn’t get to really nail the steps down. For the next session, this is definitely something I’d like to explore for the students. I would also like to teach a loop on a chair, that would end in a skill.
What did you learn from this experience that you will apply to your own training/teaching?
For most of the FFTT applications, we’ve been doing it in one-off classes or small group sessions with different people in each class. For this experience, I was able to think about progressively teaching the same group of people the different FFTT awareness techniques, and how this can be developed over time, and not only in one class. I plan to have warm ups like this in our next sessions, as well as to incorporate the loop in our awareness on chair as apparatus.
We don’t always get to handle a class that develops one choreography set over time. Most of the time, we handle a one-time class, and in the next week, we have a different set of students. With this group, however, we will be able to develop this over time, and I hope that not only the choreography itself improves, but also their awareness, their presence, their confidence in performing it, and their enjoyment of the class.
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WHAT DID YOU DO? WHY SHOULD ANYONE WATCH IT?
Exploring Floor Flow awareness techniques and prompts to teach a chair choreography class. Our HOT SEAT (Chair Dance) classes are about an hour of fun choreography on a chair! To incorporate my FFTT learnings with my current lessons, I did a few minutes of movement awareness with the students before teaching the dance steps. We were also getting oriented with dancing with a chair, so I used some floor awareness prompts (but with the chair), to have our students become more mindful of the chair as our movement partner.