On February 22 & 23 Executive Director Peter Pucci and CCF Teaching Artist Adrienne Kraus-Latanishen visited middle schools in Queen Anne’s County to teach movement and hip-hop classes. Peter collaborated with Unified Arts teacher Betsy Babylon and together they explored movement possibilities with her 6th grade theater students.
The students responded well to the movement class. They enjoyed the new and different way of working together as a group. There were lots of laughs and fun when the students were learning new movement phrases. The students were thrilled to show Peter the dance routine from Grease the musical that they have been working on. Peter worked with the students on their choreography and they had a great time improvising and creating new movement based on their dance routine.
Peter and Adrienne worked with Keli Goldsborough, a chorus and theater arts teacher. Keli was interested to have hip hop classes for her 8th and 6th grade students since her classes were celebrating the 50th anniversary of hip hop. Adrienne spoke with the students briefly about the history of hip-hop and the four foundational styles of hip hop that she was going to teach them; House, Breaking, Lock, and Pop. Adrienne asked the students to accomplish three things by the end of class:
- Learn something new
- Have fun
- Be proud of yourself.
Her first class consisted of 25 / 8th graders and her second class had 22 / 6th graders. All of the students were more than willing and excited about the possibility of learning some hip-hop movement. The students did a terrific job following Adrienne and learning the movements. It was a fun, loose environment in both classes as the students were helping each other learn the moves and engaging with Adrienne. She talked them through the choreography, using some traditional hip-hop music to accompany the dance.
By the end of the session the students had memorized a :30 movement phrase. The students accomplished the three things Adrienne asked them to do, they learned something new, they had fun, and they were definitely proud of themselves.
Read the featured article about this event in the Bay Times and Record Observer
