Students communicate, learn through dance moves

By Holly Kurtz
Denver Rocky Mountain News Staff Writer

Most adults who work with middle school students spend their careers trying to prevent peer pressure from transforming kids into lemmings.

On this overcast afternoon in Littleton, Speaking of Dance director Deborah Reshotko is doing exactly the opposite.

"Everyone squash up in the corner to be your lemming shape," she tells her class. "Make sure you don't look like students. You need to look like lemmings."

And so, with a little music and a lot of encouragement, this giggling, wriggling mass of Newton Middle School sixth-graders glides, slides and slips across the floor almost exactly like the little creatures they are studying in science class.

This joyful, noisy intersection of education and entertainment, choreography and science class is exactly what Speaking of Dance is all about.

For the past eight years, the Denver nonprofit has used dance to introduce Coloradans to dance and to one another.

Each weekend, student dancers ranging in age from 7 to 71 gather to develop a community dance. Each month, dozens of people watch Speaking of Dance teacher/performers present pieces on topics ranging from Western art to Judaism.

And each weekday afternoon, Speaking of Dance teachers fan out to schools around the metro area to teach children creativity, cooperation and, yes, even science.

Here at Newton, the room seems to transform as the lights dim. Gone are the plastic chairs with desks attached, the wall hanging warning "Time passes. Will You?" Forgotten are the braces and the book bags, the insecurity and the acne.

In their place are the waterfalls and songbirds, the lemmings and the frogs the students mimic in honor of the biomes they're studying in science.

"If you're going to be a lemming," says Newton teacher Georgia Arribau, "you have to know what a lemming is all about."

Budding jocks who look like they'd be more at home on the field than the dance floor imitate lemmings with Fred Astairelike moves. Girls stretched gawky by growth spurts gracefully glide. Students who are just learning English communicate without words.

They do word dances, too.

"The best way to learn a language is through your body," Arribau said. "Those words they learn from dancing they remember forever."

Reshotko hopes they will also always remember how to cooperate.

From the moment she dispersed the rigid boy/girl segregation the students enforced on themselves when they circled round her the first day of their workshop with her, she has been using dance to teach kids to work together and accept one another.

First, she rips them out of their comfort zone by grouping them with kids they might not like or know. Then she forces them to cooperate, which is pretty hard to avoid when you're forming yourself into an insectlike shape and walking across the room.

"All the ESL (English as a Second Language) kids, we don't really get to talk to them," said Dani Agos, 12. "When we get them in our group here, we interact."

Jeff Lester, 11, has noticed that, too.

"I know sometimes kids tease people because they feel left out," he said. "In this class, it's a group effort. You can't feel left out."

Contact Holly Kurtz at (303) 892-5082 or at kurtzh@RockyMountainNews.com.

December 11, 2000