Book week dance workshops

Book week dance workshops are so much fun!

Zest was invited back to Krishna Avanti school in Leicester to link in with their book week (see our previous blog about when we did them some Van Gogh inspired dance workshops). Their two year 2 classes were reading ‘George’s Marvellous Medicine’ by Roald Dahl, and wanted us to do a dance workshop to make the story come alive for them.

Growing up devouring ALL of Roald Dahl’s books, we were really looking forward to delivering this dance workshop. The way he uses onomatopoeia, rhyming patterns, descriptive language to generate excitement, and wicked sense of humour – it’s a dream to translate it into dance!

We chose two sections of the story to work with, which read like poems, from when George was making the medicine:

Class 1’s section:

Fiery broth and witches brew,

Foamy froth and riches blue.

Fume and spoom and spoon drip spray,

Frizzle, swizzle and shout hooray.

Watch it sloshing, swashing, sploshing,

Hear it hissing, squishing, spitting.

Grandma better start to pray…

Will she go pop?

Will she explode?

Will she go flying down the road?

Will she go poof, in a poof of smoke?

Or will she start fizzing like a can of coke?

Who knows, not I,

Let’s wait and see,

I’m glad it’s neither you nor me,

Oh Grandma, if you only knew,

What I have in store for you…

Class 2’s section:

A magic medicine it shall be,

So give me a bug, and a jumping flea,

Give me 2 snails, and lizards 3,

And a slimy squiggler from the sea,

And the poisonous sting of the bumble bee,

And the juice from the fruit of the Joo Joo tree,

And the powdered bone of a Wombat’s knee,

And a hundred other things as well, each with a rather nasty smell,

I’ll stir them up, I’ll boil them long,

A mixture tough, a mixture strong,

And then hey ho, and down it goes,

A nice big spoonful, hold ya nose,

Just gulp it down and have no fear,

And how do you like it, Granny dear?

It was so much fun for us choreographing these two dances. The imagery Dahl uses in his books is amazing and fun for us to turn into some really humorous dances which the children loved, and could really connect to.

We had an hour and ten minutes teaching each class their different dances. Then both classes all came back together at the end of the morning to perform their dances to teach other. We read the sections of the story out loud before each performance, to help the children recognise different parts of it while they watched the dances.

The children have also started in class to write their own poems of potions they would make, so they will be turning these into dances in their PE lessons now that we have given them some inspiration and tips to make their dances come alive!

For more info on our Book week dance workshops, take a look at our previous blog…