Chinese Dance Workshops

Chinese dance workshops were enjoyed by Belmont Junior School last week, for their multicultural themed week.

The had chosen one dance style only for every class, and as they teach Mandarin in the school, they went for Chinese dance.

We focused on the traditional Chinese fan dance, and provided everyone with a fan to use in the workshops (see pic below).

Timetable

We taught 8 classes throughout the day, from years 3 to 6, with each getting a 30min workshop. It was a bit of a rush as for our Chinese fan dance workshops we have loads of great props to show at the start. But we couldn’t take too long showing those, as we had to get a dance taught too!

Props

The props we show are a Chinese flag, a red lantern, a firecracker wall hanging, Chinese clothes, pictures of Chinese writing, traditional dancing dragons. Our favourite is a lucky lion puppet called Zac. The children love to have a go making him dance and move.

There was a sharing assembly planned for the end of the day – so the pressure was on for us to teach dances to every class!

Performance

Each year group had a different dance to perform in the assembly. Everyone loved seeing what the other classes had been up to, as the dances were really varied. Some dances were more traditional and intricate, and some were more abstract. Year 3’s dance was based on the patterns used for Chinese dragon dancing. Such as ‘Chasing the pearl’, ‘Spirals’ and the ‘Wave’.

Chinese dance is great as it’s all about team work as there’s a lot of unison involved in it. It promotes working together well in the classes, and helping each other to achieve a clean polished dance. This looks really impressive at the end.

We are looking forward to Chinese New Year next Feb with all the dance workshops we will have booked in!