Perpetual Motion: Creative Movement Exercises for Dance & Dramatic Arts

If you've shied away from teaching dance-related movement skills in your class because you're unfamiliar with the subject or think your class won't be interested, consider this: Creative movement exercises help young people develop important learning skills, such as group dynamics, listening, problem solving, and language. Plus, creative movement skills are a fun way to introduce students to using movement as a form of expression.

Now there's a resource that makes it easy for you to include creative movement exercises in your class so that your students can learn these valuable skills. Perpetual Motion: Creative Movement Exercises for Dance and Dramatic Arts helps you get both female and male students excited about dance, build essential skills, and improve educational outcomes—even if you've never taught movement exercises before.

Perpetual Motion introduces more than 100 movement exercises organized around six themes: rules, recipes, props, poetry and prose, objects and images, and integrated arts.

Everything you need is here to inspire students to step out of their movement comfort zones and develop their own potential. Each chapter identifies a theme, specific learning skills, recommended exercises, and a strategy for stimulating class discussion about the exercises. Plus, teachers have the convenience of being able to select exercises from 12 categories of learning skills.

You can adapt these versatile exercises with ease and success to challenge beginners as well as skilled dance students. Within each exercise you'll find variations you can use to increase the difficulty, add variety, and create more than 90 entirely new exercises.

The book includes other features to make the movements easy to teach:
-A 15-minute warm-up routine builds teachers' confidence.

-A glossary of movement terms ensures clear communication when integrating projects.

-A handy “finder” chart lets you quickly identify exercises that meet the learning skills you want. Perpetual Motion will enable any teacher to successfully integrate creative movement exercises into general classroom, physical education, dramatic arts, and language arts classes. There is no better reference for overcoming students' fears about dance and helping them develop vital learning skills that will pay off in any educational setting.

Janice Pomer has been teaching and performing in the fields of dance, theatre, and music since 1976. She has been a guest artist in schools, universities, international education conferences, dance studios, and art centers in communities throughout North America. Janice has introduced thousands of elementary and high school students to creative movement and choreography in a variety of special projects that integrate dance with visual art, music, theatre, architecture, nature, and urban studies. She has taught and created programs for the Canadian Children's Dance Theatre (1983-1995), the National Ballet of Canada's education department (1990-1997), the Children's Dance Project (1993-2000), and the Toronto Urban Studies Centre, Through the Arts Studio (1996-2001). Janice teaches modern dance at Pegasus Children's Dance Centre in Toronto, Onario, Canada.