Children of the Mills was a collaborative project that involved a team of four creative practitioners working with children from six primary schools. The project aimed to create three linked site specific performance pieces that included theatre, dance, song and video, which together told the story of the people that worked in the Arkwright mills of the industrial revolution. More detail about the process of the overall project can be found in the 'Making History' section, under About the Process.

More detail about the movement and dance specific elements can be found in 'Moving Through History' under About the Process.

 

In this section, I will describe the process that the children involved in the dance work went through with me.

As context to the process involved, I feel it’s important to point out that as well as setting out to create movement work for the performance piece, the dance workshops had generic creative learning aims in themselves:

• motivating and inspiring the learners
• developing their imaginations
• building their self confidence as creative people
• developing communication and expressive skills
• engaging with individual’s kinaesthetic learning abilities
• making structures work
• reflecting on and improving the work

Each of these areas is developed in different ways through the key processes of:

• game playing
• exploring movement/developing vocabulary
• improvisation
• group working
• structuring
• refining
• performing
• reflecting

These in turn fit into a workshop structure that follows the pattern of:

• warm up (game playing, exploring movement/developing vocabulary)
• exploring ideas (improvising, exploring movement/developing vocabulary, group working)
• making a dance piece (group working, structuring, refining, performing and reflecting)

For me two of the most important of these elements are improvising and structuring:

Improvising

(playing with ideas as they happen) on given themes and within given structures is really important both in developing people’s confidence in themselves as dancers and as creative people, and in allowing space for the imagination to flow and ideas to be explored. Structured improvisations allow people to move as themselves, and to respond directly to stimulus and to those they are improvising with. It requires acute non-verbal communication and awareness of the other dancer/s. You will find specific ideas for structured improvisations in the downloadable workshop document.

Structuringwork (making up dances) with ideas that have arisen during improvisations allows people to work together - requiring group working skills such as communication and co-operation – and also empowers participants to make their own choreography that expresses the theme or narrative. Giving participants time for both reflection on the effectiveness of the piece created, and for subsequent refining and improving of their work, deepens the level of understanding and learning.

I have also found that children and young people really respond well to contact dance skills involving trust and counterbalance/support work, and I included this area of practice in the workshops.

The workshops described below explored two main themes in connection with the narrative developed through the drama work (see Andy Barrett’s pages), and with the mill sites themselves:

• Expressing feelings - how the children working in the mills might have felt;
• Working together – communities giving and receiving support.

Other themes that were explored and developed into pieces for the final performance were: the river as the driving force, factory machines, servants at work in the Arkwright home, privileged education of Arkwright’s children (dance of the era), community celebration dances in honour of Richard Arkwright. Some of these were approached from an abstract starting point (e.g. the river dance), some from a narrative context (community celebration dances), and some from a humorous and deliberately anachronistic point of view (e.g. the servants at work, dancing the polka). As you can see, the sites proved to be a rich mine for stimulus and inspiration.

Debi Hedderwick

Three Workshop Outlines

The process and underlying aims outlined in the ‘about the process’ section can be organized into three distinct workshops (of 45 mins – 1 hour) that each use warm up, improvisation and structuring activities to make and show group dance pieces on the theme Children of the Mills: expressing feelings and working together.

 

Workshop One: Expressing Feelings

Warm Up

• Circle game: how do you feel today
• Warm up exercises
• Exploring movement: moving around the room with different qualities
• Moving with feeling, different qualities for different feelings

Exploring ideas

• Improvisation activities

Making a dance piece

• Discussion: how the children of the mills might have felt
• Storyline
• Selecting ideas
• Structuring
• Showing

Warm Up

Circle game. How do you feel today:

The purpose of the game is to introduce the central idea of the workshop through a game format - this makes it fun and gives participants the idea that there are no right or wrong ways of doing it/expressing themselves.

Make a circle. Ask participants how they are feeling today (happy, tired, excited etc), and to find a movement or shape that expresses the feeling. This doesn’t have to be realistic or recognisable. Around the circle each person in turn says their name and makes their feeling shape or movement. Everyone else in the circle repeats their name and copies their shape as accurately as possible. At the end ask the participants if they were able to empathise with how others were feeling.

Warm up exercises:

The purpose of these exercises is to warm the body up to be able to move without injury, but also to increase movement ability and range, and give people confidence through an extended potential vocabulary.

• Breathing and stretching: Connect this to vocabulary of emotions:

breathing in to stretch out and up with your arms (feeling open and ready?), breathing out to fold into a crouch position (feeling quiet and soft?), breathing in to extend your body into a new position of your own (what does this position make you feel?), breathing out to lower to the floor (feeling relaxed?), breathing in three times to slowly return to standing (feeling expansive, strong/powerful, energetic?). Breathe out to rest. Repeat with new shape in middle of exercise.

• Moving in circles: ask participants to move first their shoulders, then

half their arms (touching finger tips to shoulders), then whole arm in forwards and backwards circles (four counts for each to establish rhythmical movement).

Suggest that they imagine they are painting a picture with differently coloured circular patterns all around themselves, using first their lead hand, and then their other hand.

Extend this to painting circles with their feet, top of their heads (make sure that they don’t bend their necks backwards), noses, backs, knees etc – different body parts leading.

Ask if the picture they have painted (colours and shapes used) expresses any particular feeling.

• Working the feet: it’s very important to warm up the feet and lower

legs in dance to ensure dancers are ready for jumps and leaps. Ask the participants to articulate the feet through the heel and toes to an extended foot position and then reverse (one count for each move). Then go on to peeling the foot off the floor as if stuck firmly in thick mud. Then go on to using one foot at a time as if jumping and landing. Rise onto the balls of the feet, lower and bend the knees (this is the jumping and landing action in slow motion and teaches the correct use of feet and legs). Finally progress to small soft jumps on the spot.

Exploring the movement

The purpose of these exercises is to give participants the opportunity to use the space more freely to explore their personal movement vocabulary and mode of expression for the workshop theme.

Moving around the room with different qualities:

• firstly introduce the idea of varied movement quality in an abstract context (not connected to the theme). Ask the participants to follow the verbal instructions, but to interpret them in their own way. Moving round the room, starting with jogging (to establish good use of space), then (for example) rolling, spinning, extending (stretching into shape), skipping, galloping, leaping.
• then add movement qualities that they should interpret in their own way – this is to increase movement expressiveness before tackling the theme: move around the room exploring words such as soft, spiky, floating, powerful, fast, slow, flowing, interrupted etc. Ask the participants for their ideas.
• then do the same but using vocabulary of emotion: happy, sad, angry, shy, fearful etc. Ask the participants for their ideas. It is very likely that the dancers will naturally try to mime these emotions. Really try to encourage them to express the feeling of the emotion without miming/acting. Ask them where they feel that particular emotion and then ask them to let that part of the body lead the movement. Ask them how the emotion feels (tight, open, wobbly, etc) and then ask them to express this quality.

Exploring ideas

Improvisation activities: the purpose of using some specific structured improvisation activities here is to encourage participants to increase their awareness of and confidence in their own expressive abilities and to increase their ability to respond to each other and to ideas that arise spontaneously.

• Dialogue: In pairs. Talk about how a conversation goes between two people – an exchange of ideas/ information in which one person talks whilst the other listens, and then the other responds whilst the first listens etc. Link this to the exercise: the first person moves in whatever way they want whilst the other, holding a shape, watches. Then the second responds, in whatever way they like, whilst the first holds their shape and watches etc. Encourage the participants to respond spontaneously using shorter (single movement) or longer phrases, whole body or single body parts, different levels, echoing or contrasting movements. Any movement vocabulary is OK – within safe parameters.
• Whose leading: In pairs. This exercise explores how the balance of power in terms of leader/follower can be played with. One person starts as leader and the other copies the movement as accurately as they can (not as a mirror, using right foot when the leader is using the left foot, but as identical). On a command the second person takes over the lead and the first person copies. This swop should be done without talking or pausing. At the next command both dancers become equal leaders/followers, each observes and responds, instigating movement as they want to, following as they need to. A magical communication takes place and a spontaneous partner dance evolves without planning or talking!

Making a dance piece

Discussion:
how the children of the mills might have felt. (This presumes some specific preparation, discovery and learning in this particular area of history). Talk with the participants about how they think the children who were working in the mills might have felt about their employment, how they might have felt at the beginning and end of the day, what they might have wanted to change about their lives, etc. Talk about specific emotions connected to different events/activities and times of day.

Storyline:
ask the participants to make small groups (4 or 5) and to create a storyline for themselves about a part of the children’s day – e.g. waking and going to work, getting started in the factory – and to then explore movement ideas and pathways in the room that communicates the storyline and expresses the emotions clearly. Encourage them not to try and tell a long or complicated story, but rather a short and clear one that communicates the emotional context as compared to events.

Selecting ideas and structuring:
encourage the participants to think about their ideas and select those that they feel are the most expressive and communicative of the theme/story. Talk to them about structure/form of their work. This could be as simple as beginning, middle and ending, or could include spatial structure (pathways), dynamic structure, contrast, unison/counterpoint etc depending on the experience of your group.

Showing:
allow plenty of time for showing work, in the context of sharing good ideas around the class. Both preparing their own work for showing and watching others helps participants develop their skills in communicating ideas clearly. It also gives opportunity for building confidence through praise in picking out the most successful elements of each group’s work. I like to ask all participants to think about one thing they thought worked really well, or they liked or responded to, whilst they are watching and to offer positive comments, as this encourages thoughtful observation and reflective\analytical skills.

 

Workshop Two: Working Together

Warm Up

• Game: push and pull
• Warm up exercises
• Understanding your weight and balance

Exploring ideas

• Trust games: in a circle
• falling in pairs
• Contact exercises: sharing weight, supporting a partner
• Push and pull
• Lean onto back
• Fall and recover
• Chair lift

Making a dance piece

• Discussion: communities working together
• Storyline
• Selecting ideas
• Structuring
• Showing

Warm Up

Game. push and pull:

The purpose of this game is to introduce the theme of the session, working together with trust, support and counterbalance, through the format of a game.

Before the game, explain that each member of the group must work in a responsible and trustworthy way with their partner, being responsible for their safety and well being. Practice the counterbalance positions of push and pull.

Push – partners put flat hands against each other (as in prayer position), move their feet away from each other and push with EQUAL weight and balance against their partner. To finish it’s really important that the participants know that they move towards each other to release the counterbalance without letting their partner fall.

Pull – partners hold each other’s wrists without squeezing (one person’s hands facing up, and one person’s hands facing down). They move their feet away from each other and pull each other with EQUAL strength and balance. As before, it’s very important that participants know that if they don’t walk towards each other to finish then one person could fall and hurt themselves.

The game: when the music plays the participants move around the space, weaving in and out, changing direction and keeping as much space around themselves as possible. When the music stops they find a partner and either push or pull according to the command. They finish the counterbalance when told to move together. It’s good if participants find a different partner each time, so that they can feel the different amount of weight and strength to use against their partner to keep an effective balance.

N.B. Of course as teachers or group leaders you will know if there are any children who are best not partnered together, or who need an adult near them to ensure responsible response to this game.

Warm up exercises

I think that repetition is not only good for physical learning, but also helps participants feel more confident in what they are doing. Asking the dancers to think about different things as they work can extend the learning:

• Breathing and stretching as before.
• Circling movements as before.
• Feet and lower legs as before.

But connect comments to the theme of balance:

• can you feel your weight changing to different parts of your body?
• adding moments of balance to the circling exercise.
• can you balance on one foot?
• can you feel your weight wanting to come down as soon as you take off?

Understanding your weight and balance

• Falling softly to the floor. Ask participants to allow themselves to fall slowly, with soft limbs, to the floor, as if in a faint. Ask them to feel their weight being gradually taken by the floor as they give into it and relax.
• Feeling the change of weight as you move back to standing. Ask participants to really feel and think about the many changes of weight in the body as they stand up again.
• Pushing into the air for a leap. Ask the participants to run and leap and consider how their weight (under the force of gravity) wants to return to the earth. How weight falls and how it must be controlled as it lands.
• Leaning against the wall. Ask participants to lean against the wall really giving their weight to the support of the vertical surface.

Exploring ideas

Trust games.

The purpose of these games is to build trust within the group and to ensure that participants working together are responsible for each other and support each other’s weight.

• in a circle: participants stand in a circle of about 8 people. One person is in the middle. It’s really important that everyone in the circle knows that they are responsible at all times, and that more than one person is always there as a “catcher”. The people in a circle have their shoulders close enough to be touching so that there are no gaps. The person in the centre keeps their body completely stiff in the middle, so that they lean not bend, and their feet still, as if nailed to the floor. When everyone is ready the person in the centre leans forward, backwards or sideways, and is caught on the shoulders by the people in the circle who are closest. EVERYONE IS RESPONSIBLE FOR THAT PERSON! It’s good if the central person can close their eyes.
• falling in pairs: one person stands in front of the other with their back turned. When they know that the other person is ready they start to fall in the slow and soft way practiced above. The other person catches the faller’s weight by hooking their arms underneath the armpits. The catcher lowers the faller softly to the floor. The faller does not give their whole weight to the catcher, but takes some of the responsibility for getting to the floor safely themselves. When the faller is on the floor, the catcher steps over them, takes one hand and moves backwards, pulling to help the faller return to standing. Both participants should be able to feel the share and change of weight and responsibility.

Contact exercises:

Sharing weight, supporting a partner.

The purpose of these exercises is to show participants how you can take the weight of a partner into a support/balance through using counterbalance rather than strength. These supports can then be used expressively in dances.

• Push and pull. Reprise if necessary.
• Lean onto back. The partners should be of approximately equal size. One person stands behind the other. The person in front is the support, the other is the lifted. The support bends their knees and holds their hands above their head and holds the wrists of the other (the lifted). They bend slowly forward, hinging at the hips (not bending their backs). As they do so the lifted person will come easily off the ground – it’s important that they stay relaxed and don’t kick their feet around, as this will make them wobbly and the support unstable. To finish the support comes all the way back up to standing so that the lifted person’s feet are firmly on the ground.
• Fall and recover. As above but with more flow, maybe concentrating on varying how the fall and recovery happen (direction, speed, dynamic, pause), and adding transitional movement into and out of the fall and recover.
• Moving over crouches: In pairs. One person crouches in tight ball or on all fours. The other finds slow and soft ways of moving over the shape – “pouring” their body over the shape that is the support.
• Chair lift. In threes. Two people make a seat with their hands – the best way, I think is for each person to hold their own left wrist and, facing their partner, their partner’s right wrist. The third person sits in the hand-chair, putting their arms around the supports’ shoulders and is lifted off the floor. It’s important, as in all lifting, that the support people keep their backs straight at all times. Make sure that the participants know that the lifted person’s feet go back to the floor first, and that the lift is not finished until their feet are on the ground! Sometimes children do get carried away and want to go onto the next idea before they are safely finished with the one they are involved in.

There are many other supports and lifts that can be safely used, teachers amongst you will know some from gymnastics, bearing in mind that in dance the movement into and out of the support usually needs to be flowing rather than static.

N.B. You will know your group – be very aware of how much you think they can take on safely, and ensure that responsibility is being taken and instructions followed very carefully.

Making a dance piece

Discussion:
communities working together. Discuss the idea with the group, that despite hardships in the life of the workers in the mill factories of the era, communities and families worked together and looked after each other.

Storyline:
Ask the participants to work in small groups (4 or 5) to make a short narrative about a situation in which someone needs help or support. E.g. maybe they are tired, or they don’t want to go to work that day. Maybe they have been hurt or are hungry and have run out of strength. Make sure the narratives allow space for some of the support movement practiced to be included as expressive material.

Selecting ideas.
As above.

Structuring.
As above.

Showing.
As above.

 

Workshop Three: Making the Dance

This session is mainly dedicated to creating a finished and more polished dance piece, and to sharing and showing it to the rest of the group.

Warm up:

The warm up can use material from previous sessions. It is a good idea to ask for ideas and suggestions from the participants to consolidate their learning from the previous week, allow them to add and embellish and to extend their learning with their own ideas.

Revise ideas:

Revisit some of the ideas from the previous sessions, maybe:

• encouraging the dancers to really try and express feelings with their whole body, maybe trying to help the movement develop from a more abstract basis rather than a mime, maybe encouraging varied use of quality, dynamic, speed and level.
• Revise the support work with an emphasis on remembering safe practice, or if you are sure of that, then concentrating on movement into and out of supports to encourage flow.

Making the piece: time to work together.

This group work is intended to bring the ideas of the other two workshop sessions together, using expressive movement based on feelings and emotions as well as trust and contact work to communicate the theme of communities working together and supporting each other. Give plenty of time for the groups to develop their ideas, shape them into a structure that tells the story and to practice and refine their work. I normally find they are much better left to their own devises, rather than suggesting material – unless a group gets completely stuck, or can’t work out differences of opinion! Rather than suggesting material, try to encourage dancers to think about working with their best material (as opposed to every idea they come up with), and to include changes of quality, speed, dynamic, and level as appropriate to express their narrative.

In groups of 4 – 6: Ask the participants to think about how the children working in the mills might have felt at the end of their working day – were they exhausted, relieved, hungry, dying get home, needing support, hurt etc. Ask them to make a story about the journey home at the end of the day, and create a short dance piece that shows the children’s feelings and their mutual support and for each other.

As detailed above, make sure that when the pieces are shared at the end of the session you leave time for the rest of the group to make positive comments about what they have seen – bits they really liked, or thought were effective, and why.

The music for dance tasks like this is really important, and in the section “Other Resources” I have included the titles of some CDs that I have found very useful in providing the right atmosphere and setting the scene.

Above all the session should be fun, and the participants should feel that they have really achieved something in creating their own dance work. A positive atmosphere in which all ideas are appreciated is vital. Using a video camera to record work at the end of the session, and playing back for the participants to watch is a good idea from time to time. Not only will the children enjoy watching themselves, but also they will learn from it by seeing for themselves what ideas really worked well.

PHSE: Citizenship:

Over the past two years, I have been doing a great deal of dance work in schools on themes from the Citizenship curriculum, which has been very effective in exploring ideas of community, friendship and bullying – working with each other responsibly and thoughtfully, understanding one another, celebrating different communities and cultures.

I think that exploring and gaining insight into and understanding of people’s lives during the Industrial Revolution ties in well with PHSE and Citizenship. For older students there are also the wider global issues of fair and legal employment, justice and accountability, fair trade. Mock trials to examine some of these issues could be written and staged. Comparisons can be made between the period of local history and today’s trading and working standards (employment of minors) in developing countries for the benefit of commerce and economic growth in developed countries. (A youth dance group I work with has, in fact, created a dance performance piece entitled “My Favourite Things” on this theme. In it they counterpose a flashy fashion show with a factory scene in which under privileged young people are making the clothes for the show.) The idea is not to offer solutions but to gain insight and some degree of understanding of issues involved.

Literacy: creative writing:

I have found that dance work leads very successfully into creative writing.

Example 1: following the workshop on Exploring Feelings, participants can be asked to write down all the feelings words they can think of on one half of a piece of paper, then write down movement words (the more descriptive and unusual, the better) on the other half of the paper. Bearing the narrative dance task in mind – the working children’s day at the factory, write a poem describing part of the day, using the feeling words and the movement words together.

Example 2: following the third workshop Making the Dance, ask the participants to write the story of their dance narrative, but encourage them to use words that describe the way they felt when they were dancing in their group – did the person they supported feel heavy, did their bodies feel wobbly, shaky, out of breath, was the end of their journey in sight or did it feel like a journey that would never end.

The dance work will provide a wonderful source of descriptive material for writing, and the stories have already been formed as a basis to work from.

Science

There are also obvious links with science in this project. I have been engaged over several years in extensive work investigating, through action research with groups of children, the value of using dance to increase interest and understanding in science topics. The result has been that children have shown considerably increased engagement with the subject, and in some areas in particular (energy and forces, materials and their properties, growth and change in plants and animals) they have increased their learning, understanding and memory.

During this project we talked about the river being the driving force for the industrial innovations and developments, and about how a water wheel works in order to generate energy. The children created the flow of a river with cloth materials and movement, and formed a working human water wheel through which the water could flow.

We also thought about the machines in the factories and how the constituent parts work together to do the job required. The children made human machines with their bodies, thinking about how each movement they did had to fit together with/drive another person’s movement forward, in the same way a cog or a camshaft works in reality.

I have found few written dance resources that really focus on creative and imaginative work, using improvisation as a basis for generating and developing ideas, and that allow a theme to be developed over a series of sessions to create dance pieces in some depth, rather than meeting National Curriculum needs in a much more formal way.

However, from a generic point of view, I think the following is useful:

• "Letting the buggers be creative" Sue Cowley

You might find the National Dance Teachers Association website useful, it has lesson plans, ideas and resource lists for teachers of dance in schools, at all key stages: www.ndta.org.uk , also there are downloadable lesson plans for dance based on personal and social issues, and communication, at Key Stages at 3 and 4 on www.chalkface.com .

And watching good choreography with your students can be inspiring. These works have historical themes, or dramatic narratives, and are a really good example of expressive work in contemporary dance:

• "Ghost Dances" by Christopher Bruce
• "Carmen" by Carlos Saura
• "West Side Story", choreography by Jerome Robbins

Music I have found to be essential as a resource for workshops:

World music:

• "World percussion" - 32 tracks of various musicians
• "Planet Drum" - Mickey Hart
• "Big Drum, Small World" - Dhol Foundation
• "La Bottine Sourrante" - Anthology

Classical: (usually good old favourites!)

• "Young Persons Guide to the Orchestra" - Britten
• "Pictures at an Exhibition" - Mussorsky
• "Carnival of the Animals" - Saint Saens
• "The Planets" - Holst
• "The Firebird"/"The Rite of Spring" - Stravinsky
• "Sonatas and Interludes for Prepared Piano" - John Cage
• Various - The Kronos Quartet
• Various - Ligeti