After that we reviewed the ideas of "playful" and "focused" from last class. I asked each girl to reflect on whether she thought she was more playful or more focused in everyday life. There were quite a range of answers! Several students thought they were a good balance of both playful and focused. Several other students said that they are definitely more playful. No one wrote that she thought she was more focused than playful.
We also reviewed how we did with group juggling from last class. Everyone agreed that the movement work was wonderful, but that the students' lack of focus caused the ball to be dropped during the game more often than it should. We played again during this class to see if we could improve. With less students than during the last class the game became even more challenging! We will continue to work together to improve both our movement and focus.
Next I explained that we would be looking at the different elements of the earth during this session: water, fire, earth, and air. We will work on moving like the elements along with creating masks to represent each element. For this class we started with the element of water and the students wrote down as many different types of water as they could think of.
After discussing initial ideas of what water is, I asked the students to move into any part of the room and begin to move like one of the types of water they wrote on the paper. To add another challenge, the students were to be present in their own movement but also paying attention to the other students around them. At the end we guessed which types of water were being expressed through movement. I was very impressed by many different ways movement was used to communicate the idea of water.
After that, each student began designing her mask that is trying to capture the essence of water. Many beautiful shapes began to emerge, and I'm looking forward to seeing where this project leads.
