On the way to Greece, we learned that our group was rotating between the Eleonas Camp and the Apostoli Community Center. We would be working with Refugee children in Eleonas and with Greek Children from broken and poor families at Apostoli. Due to this, we received a solid insight into both the refugee crisis and Greece’s economic crisis.With that age group in mind, our group decided to choreograph relatively simple moves and choose catchy songs. Moreover, we also wanted to integrate the diversity of the group into our workshop, so we had a variety of songs, a catchy Arabic one, a pop English mix and a Bollywood-Spanish mix. We followed the same general plan for our Apostoli workshops,too.
In the past, some of us have choreographed a few Bollywood songs for social responsibility workshops or for other University events. In those situations, we would usually select a song and choreograph according to the beats and lyrics of that song. However, in this situation, we hadn’t ever interacted with the children before and we weren’t aware of their preferences. Consequently, we decided to follow Aakash’s flexible method of teaching; he had a set sequence of movements which he taught us, and this sequence could be performed with any song. Hence, we created two choreographies; one choreography was devised for an English Pop song ,with either Beyoncé’s Crazy in Love or Viva la Vida Loca,and we had another choreography for two potential Bollywood-Spanish mixes. We didn’t think we would need more choreographies to conduct our hourly workshops. We also devised a warm-up piece on an Arabic song.
Our final general plan was to start with an icebreaker that involved an introduction with a movement, a stretching session, a warm-up piece on the catchy Inti Ma’alam (Arabic Song), one choreography on either Crazy in Love or Viva la Vida Loca depending on the mood and another choreography on either of the two Bollywood mixes, if we had time. We aimed to end the workshop with a story shared through the hand phrase, taught in class. Our back-up options were to play memory games, hand games, host a story-telling session, perform a routine on the Bingo song or a samba and capoeira routine.