According to the plan, we were supposed to be going to the Eleonas’ Camp with another group and teach separate workshops. However, one of the workshops got cancelled so both the groups taught the same workshop. The other group started the workshop with their warm-up, stretches and a choreography of Rolex. We also realized that the children were quite used to dance,most of them spoke English and had a lot of song preferences such as Despacito, specific Bollywood songs and pop Arabic songs. This led to a bit of confusion when it was time for our group to conduct the second half of the workshop because at this point, the children were quite excited and very energetic, and they were becoming comfortable to share their preferences, but we weren’t prepared for their song preferences nor were we prepared to manage their energy levels.
However, we decided to stick to our plan with the warm-up on the Arabic song, which was quite well-received, and our choreographies for the Bollywood-Spanish mix. Instead of following the natural teaching process where we first teach the moves and then play the songs and rehearse, we decided to introduce two or three basic moves and then started playing the song and repeating the moves, in a sequence. Overall, the songs were quite well-received and enjoyed by the children but there were gaps in our management of the workshop as we would discuss with each other, quite a lot during the workshop and there were technical difficulties with the music; which would, consequently, make it difficult to keep the children involved and entertained.
In preparation for the next day, we decided to adopt an improvisation approach to the workshops, where we will use our prior choreographies but primarily allow the children’s preferences and mood to steer the direction of the workshop.