Honestly, I don't know anything about dance. I think I've seen "The Nutcracker" a few times, but I haven't seen much that wasn't on my DVD of Stravinsky ballets.

How does this make me qualified to blog about dance? I am a neophyte. But I write in a blog.

Where do I begin with contemporary dance? What place does it have in a curriculum?

If I woke up tomorrow morning and someone asked me to teach a lesson about contemporary dance, here's what I would do:

- This how-to on ARTSEDGE describes the basic elements of dance: space, time, and energy, and mentions a few more elements, like patterns of motion and body parts.

- I found "this is not en exit" on Youtube. Even though I don't know anything about dance, it's stunning.



What place does this have in the curriculum? Watching this dance could be a jumping-off point for many teaching topics.

- In a biology class, students can talk about how the dancers use different parts of the body in different ways. They can invent their own dances (the elbow dance, the clavicle dance, etc.) to help them learn the different body parts.

- The "zombie walk" and "nausea" featured prominently in this particular dance remind me of Jean-Paul Sartre's La Nausee. Students in a literature, philosophy, or French class can discuss the similarities between this dance and the ideas in the novel.

- This ARTSEDGE lesson plan is super cool! Students create a dance to help them learn atomic and molecular structure.

How do you think this dance could be included in your curriculum?