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Dance and Performing Arts
"You have to love dancing to stick to it. It gives nothing back, no manuscripts to store away, no paintings to show on walls and maybe hang in museums, no poems to be printed and sold, nothing but that single fleeting moment when you feel alive. It is not for unsteady souls." - Merce Cunningham
Dance is alive and very well at BRJ. Within the curriculum it is offered to KS3 students as part of Performing Arts and in KS4 and KS5 at GCSE and Advanced Level. As an extra curricular activity there is a dance club for each year group each lunch time and each evening after school. The dance department is never empty, with groups rehearsing in our amazing studio and in the hall and on the stage, before school, at lunch time and after school, particularly in the lead up to our annual production and when our Arts Award students are busy with their own choreography.
At exam level, both at GCSE and A Level, students are expected to perform, to choreograph solo and group pieces and to analyse professional dance works for the written examinations. Professional dance works are studied both on film and live in the theatre. There are a number of theatre trips each year to the Lowry Theatre in Manchester, Birmingham Hippodrome and our local theatres, The Place in Oakengates and Theatre Severn in Shrewsbury. Companies we have seen recently include Rambert Dance Company, Matthew Bourne’s New Adventures Company and Alvin Ailey American Dance Company.
We have strong links with DanceXchange in Birmingham through the Telford Culture Zone and have recently been involved in two projects; one for our drama students, which was a six week play writing course delivered by the playwriting officer from Birmingham Repertory Theatre and the ‘Belonging’ project, which involved all our Polish students in years seven to ten, who explored the idea of belonging through drama and movement. The ‘Making Choreographers’ project is a three year project for a small number of dance students from the Telford area and one of our own students, Dagmar Birnbaum is one of that elite group who have been working with the artists from DanceXchange and a number of professional dance companies in order to develop their skills as choreographers. This is a very demanding course requiring massive commitment from the participants but it does have its perks. Recently Dagmar and the group met Matthew Bourne before working with dancers at Sadlers Wells theatre in London to choreograph the curtain raiser for Matthew’s ‘Swan Lake’ at the Hippodrome in Birmingham. The group received a five minute accolade by Matthew before the performance. (I did of course offer to chaperone Dagmar on her trip to London but sadly, I was not needed!) Dagmar is also a member of the Telford Youth Dance Company so, as you can see, the life of an aspiring professional is a very busy one.
"Dance is the hidden language of the soul" - Martha Graham
In the past year we have worked with three professional companies: The Rosie Kay Dance Company worked with our Silver Arts Award students last year, choreographing a curtain raiser which they performed just before the company’s performance at the Place Theatre. Motionhouse Dance Company worked with the new Silver Arts Award group for two days this year and, each year Blue Eyed Soul Dance Company, an inclusive dance company, work with members of our Monday Night Club and Arts Award students to produce a piece for the dance production.
Our annual dance production is just one of our dance showcases, the other being the GCSE and A Level performance and composition evening, which features work made entirely by the students for their examination work. The two events are very different in that the production features students from throughout the school with the intention of entertaining the audience and the examination showcase features our KS4 and KS5 students, with an invited audience of family and friends, featuring work which can be challenging and which is a response to an exam question or other stimulus. The production is costumed and contains work in a variety of different genres, from Irish, to Street, to Jazz and lyrical. The examination work is rarely costumed and is mostly in the contemporary genre. We are always delighted to welcome our primary schools to our production and for a number of years St Patrick’s, St Mary’s Madeley, St Luke’s and SS Peter and Paul have all performed. This year, for the first time, we will have a group from St Mary’s Shrewsbury, with a piece choreographed by their class teacher, Sarah Staniforth, a former student and GCSE dance student at BRJ.
Our work does feature in community performances and for many years we have performed in the Telford Youth Dance Festival. This year two groups performed; a sixth form group and our new Street/Hip Hop group featuring Levan Peart, who choreographed the piece himself. As part of community project work we host the Telford Area Primary Dance Festival and The Telford Area KS3 Festival, organised by our silver Arts Award students as part of their Supervised Arts Leadership. Last year more than two hundred children, aged between five and eleven danced on our stage in one morning. We ran out of places to put them!
"Dance can give the inarticulate a voice" - Pamela Brown
We have a new Performing Arts course for KS3 students. Each student experiences Dance and Drama once each fortnight. The response so far has been very positive and the after school drama group is now rehearsing and producing the plays which were written on the playwriting course. They will be staged as written, produced and performed entirely by the students.
We are now in our third year of entering students for the Young Peoples Arts Award. This is offered at Bronze, Silver and Gold level and embraces any and every art form. This year we have dance, drama, music, art and photography students. There are a number of components: taking part, arts challenge, arts leadership, being part of an audience at any professional event, researching career pathways in the Arts and researching their own Arts Hero or Heroine. We currently have approximately thirty five students at Bronze and Silver level and, for the first time, two students at Gold level. This is a nationally recognised qualification and the Arts Award organisation is working towards recognition of the Gold level in terms of points towards university entrance.
The Arts at BRJ is an expanding area and can be attributed to the interest and enthusiasm of our students.
"The choreographic process is exhausting. it happens on one's feet after hours of work, and the energy required is roughly the equivalent of writing a novel and winning a tennis match simultaneously." - Agnes de Mille.
I dedicate this quote to all students of GCSE and A Level Dance (Diane Whiting)
Diane Whiting
Head of Dance, Performing Arts
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Click HERE if you'd like to contact Mrs Whiting with any questions about the department