Content

Design Dance and Hubbard High School partnered together in the Spring of 2016 to bring an integrative study of dance and literacy to Hubbard students for a 12 week residency. Poetry in Motion aims, through advanced workshops with our Spoken Word Poet Teaching Artists and our Dance Teaching Artists:

  •  To give students the tools to translate their personal experience onto the page through creative writing

  • Create original movement to move their thoughts from page to body.

  • The 10th grade classrooms chose to write on food, cultural identity and personal identity in their poems and worked in small groups of 2-5 to create choreography based on their writing.

Impact
During the residency, students saw:

  • an increase in confidence as they grew more comfortable expressing their individual stories

  •  an increase in empathy and community as they made collective decisions regarding their dances in their small groups

  • Classrooms exhibited pride and courage as they presented their pieces in a final performance before the entire student body and faculty at Hubbard. 

In a school where 98% of the students as classified as low-income and only 21% are deemed “ready for college,” this opportunity for creative expression and integrative learning set students up for success in a challenging climate. 

Feedback 

"When beginning the creative process at Hubbard High School the students lacked confidence in movement and creativity. During my eight weeks there we played improvisational games to create movement and storyline, learned basic dance skills such as a turn, jump and roll and learned how to take words and develop movement in relation to the emotion or action of the word. The students began to create their own movement based on these kills and the poems they created for the project and presented their work to their peers. This is where I saw the creative and courageous students I knew they could be, the shy and uncomfortable students I began with turned into proud, smiling, confident creative movers. They began to have fun performing in front of their peers and proud of the hard work they put into the creative process." --Ariel Dorsey, Teacher