Classroom Activities

Analyze: Describe some of the examples garnered from the observation assignment. Consider what kind of physical action is required in order for a person to use the machine in each of the examples.

Move: Take turns selecting one example and isolating and demonstrating the movement from the selected example (without identifying the machine). Ask others to characterize the physical relationship demonstrated between this person and the imagined machine:

• What kind of action does this machine require?
• Is a great deal or a small amount of force necessitated?
• What body parts are most involved in the action?
• What are the pathways and directions involved in this action?
• Try to identify what machine is involved in each example.

Discuss: What is the nature of the relationship implied by each of these human/machine partnerships?

Collaborate: In groups of four or five, create a repeatable movement sequence composed of the materials generated from the three observed actions each member has contributed. Each member should teach her/his movements to the group; the group task is to organize and combine these individual movements in order to create a complex group “machine.” In keeping with the definition of a machine, each individual action should appear to initiate the next action. When each group shares their composition with the rest of the class, ask viewers to pay attention to:

• Type(s) of effort needed to do the job
• Amount of space covered in personal and general space
• Spatial pathways
• Large and small movement
• Body level
• The rhythm of the actions
• Shapes made
• Repeating patterns

Write: Compose a reflective paragraph about the ways in which your body resembles machines. Then write another paragraph discussing whether this correspondence is a good thing or not.

Martha Graham’s dance theater piece, American Document (1938), featured text written by the choreographer. It was revised by Graham in 1989 and inspired a new work of the same name created by the Martha Graham Dance Company and Ann Bogart’s SITI Company in 2010. All of these iterations sought to ask “What is an American?”

Classroom Activities

Read: Read aloud excerpts from the text accompanying Martha Graham’s 1938 dance American Document.

Discuss: Talk about what becoming “American” might mean for immigrants arriving in the United States, in the past and in the present. Ask students to comment on the different perspective of the First and Second Episodes.

Write: Free-write a response (5 minutes) to the American Document text, asking students to pay particular attention to their experiences of becoming “American.” (How) Do they identify themselves as Americans? Does the history present in American Document resonate with them?  List documents, events, attitudes, social and cultural practices such as holidays, material goods and the like that contribute to that identity. Do they know people who have come to America as immigrants?  What about their own families? Discuss their experiences.

Move:

• Break into groups of four or five and share a movement learned based upon their own cultural identity (See Jawole Willa Jo Zollar).
• Teach the movement phrases to the other members of the group and discuss how the movement phrases relate to their sense of identity.
• Share the ideas created during free-writing. Does anything in the writings suggest movements or text that might contribute to a dance about American identities?

Expand:

• Keeping in mind the lists created during free-writing and discussion during your in class work, find text that defines your “American-ness.”  This might include excerpts from documents such as the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, advertising slogans, poetry, or excerpts from novels and speeches.
• Read Mona in the Promised Land or another novel dealing with identity and the immigrant experience.
• Students might research and analyze any of the documents from the text of American Document. The full text of American Document is available in Needham, Maureen ed., I See America Dancing, 206 – 215.

Final Project

• In their previously established small groups, students review the movement phrases they worked on and the materials brought into class.
• After agreeing upon a theme, students collaborate to create a movement study, using compositional techniques such as call and response, theme and variation, or phrase accumulation, and integrate the music, spoken text, design, or whatever artwork inspired their theme into the choreography.
• Students present their studies to their peers.
• Through free writing, students respond to the experience of embodying their distinctive American identities.  In writing, they compare and contrast their own movement studies with themes and movements in any of the dances that they have studied: Martha Graham’s American Document, Steps in the Street or Frontier; Pearl Primus’s The Negro Speaks of Rivers, Strange Fruit, Hard Time Blues;  Jawole Willa Jo Zollar’s Walking with Pearl.
• Students share their responses in a final discussion.

Classroom Activities

Watch: View Strange Fruit and Hard Time Blues. Ask students to observe with the following in mind: What movement elements do you see in the dances: spatial patterns (for example, straight line, circular, rectangular, lines at right angles), body shapes, and different movement qualities, i.e. light/strong, fast/slow, direct/indirect? How does Primus express themes of social commentary and protest in her work? What gestures does she use?  How do the movement elements support the meanings of these dances?

Discuss: What do Primus’s dances tell us about 1940s America?  Comment on the irony of Americans fighting to liberate Europeans during World War II, while racism continued in America.

Compare: Can you isolate and describe the differences between Primus’s and Graham’s dance expressions of social commentary and protest themes?

Move: Set up a movement experience that allows students to explore gestures and movement qualities present in Primus’s work and that students might relate to contemporary protest. This might be done through a technique class, improvisation, or dance making experience.

Read: Read the information on Pearl Primus from Margaret Lloyd’s chapter “New Leaders—New Directions” from The Borzoi Book of Modern Dance. Do some research on America in the 1940s and list some events important to African Americans in the 1940s.

Expand: Can you think of examples of social commentary and protest as reflected in popular culture today? Bring in examples of contemporary artists who use details from their lives—their experiences, their travels, their personal relationships—as inspiration for the creation of their music, visual art, literature and poetry, or dance.

Connect: You might also create a project that asks students to interview senior members of their community and collect oral histories of the Great Depression.

Research: Find American literature that reflects themes of social and political protest. Poetry is a good choice to focus on since that is the literary form Primus drew upon to inspire several of her dances.

Classroom Activities

Read: You might begin your study of Steps in the Street by asking students to read selected excerpts from Studs Terkel’s Down and Out in the Great Depression aloud or playing Woody Guthrie’s music for the students.

Expand: Discuss the Great Depression and the impact it had on the American people. Ask students to describe the images they researched by Walker Evans or Dorothea Lange.

Watch: View Graham’s Steps in the Street and ask students to observe with the following in mind: What movement elements do you see in the dance: spatial patterns (for example, straight line, circular, rectangular, lines at right angles), body shapes, and different movement qualities, i.e. light/strong, fast/slow, direct/indirect? How is protest embodied in this dance? Describe the movements. How is meaning created? Shape? Pattern? Contrast? How are the individual and the group contrasted? Who does the artist identify with?

Discuss: What does it Steps in the Street tell us about 1930s America? Do you see any similarities between the images you looked at by Walker Evans and Dorothea Lange?

Move: Divide the group in half and form several lines, standing shoulder to shoulder, scattered randomly throughout the space. As one student walks around the space, the students in lines should block his or her progress. Note: It is important to emphasize that students may not touch each other. Students should take turns being the “one against many.”

Reflect: Ask students to discuss their experiences as part of the group and as the individual moving into a group of people. What does it mean to be one against many?