Silent Choreography

Imagine that you can express your feelings and emotions about a literary work with a silent choreography instead of words.
Silent choreography is a technique that enables expressing feelings and emotions after reading or hearing a literary work (or conducting an activity in general), with body movement. The feedback consists of a specific body movement succession that builds up a story.

Tools

  • Paper.
  • Pencil.
  • Your body!

Steps

  • The moderator begins the activity by asking the participants to form groups. The groups remain the same throughout the activity and should be formed from predetermined participants.
  • The moderator asks the participants to read or listen to a chosen literary work, or to think about an activity they performed. The moderator will then read or listen to the participants talk amongst themselves about the story or activity, the main characters and the motifs for their actions.  They will be encouraged to talk very precisely about their experience, to accept their emotional responses, discuss the frame of mind of the characters and also their characteristics. 
  • The moderator then asks the participants to use whole body movement in order to show a randomly chosen element from the story, e.g. a separate characteristic or emotional response of a chosen literary character.
  • The moderator asks the participants to show their silent choreography to other groups. Participants from the other groups assess a randomly chosen element from the story.

Tips

  • The moderator must play an active part at the beginning of the activity when he/she presents the  goals and rules.
  • The participants can, if they so wish, first draw the choreography on a piece of paper.
  • At the end of the activity the moderator must sum up the activity and enable the willing participants to share what was good and what could be improved.
  • The moderator convinces them to tell what they learnt and experienced.

Sources

Created by Slovenian teachers Barbara Cotič Papotnik and Valentina Toman Čremožnik.

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.