The heater has
been broken at my school for four days. If this was Alaska, I’d be dead, but
being San Francisco, it meant teaching in a 52-degree room. Not pleasant, but
possible. But by the fourth day, yesterday, with the outside temperature at an
unusual chilly 38, it became clear that there was only one way for the kids and
I to get through the day—dance!!!
So out went my
class plans to work on the Ghana xylophone piece and review some of the jazz
pieces. In came the 6th grade and off we went with some vigorous
contra dance. In came the 8th and it was time for the Lindy Hop. In
came the 5-year olds and up they jumped to the Maple Leaf Rag and marched to
Carmen and tiptoed to Mozart’s Sonata and giant-stepped to Handel and galloped
to The Wild Horseman and swung to Chopin’s Waltz in Eb and floated to Debussy’s
Arabesque and so on. I got some good piano practice in and they got warm. The 4th
graders got to skip about in an exuberant game and then learn some cool Shim
Sham Shimmy moves taught by my visiting friend Aaron Williams. We all forgot
that the room was cold.
They say that
chopping wood heats you twice—once from the physical exertion, twice from the
logs burning in the wood stove. Same with dancing in a different way. It heats
the body and raises the room temperature with 15 moving bodies, but it also
warms the heart. A lot of partner dancing that connected people hand-to-hand,
the necessary antidote to the cold-hearted texting and chat rooms, group
circles with everyone connected in one coordinated large body, the air filled
with lively music and giggles and shouts of encouragement and just plain joy.
We were born to move and when we move to music in coherent pattern and
aesthetic expression, we reach the place where a broken heater doesn’t matter
and a broken world feels temporarily in balance. Thanks to Orff Schulwerk for
the brilliant practice of connecting movement and music, treating dancing and
playing as equal partners. If this had been a traditional orchestra rehearsal, we
would have been sawing away with frozen fingers.
Have I mentioned
that I love my job?
PS By the end of
the day, the heat finally got fixed.
That's terrible that the heater was broken. Dancing is a smart thing to do. Yes, it does warm up the body. It's good exercise, too. I think if that happened in my school, they probably either cancel the school day or make us play with frozen fingers.
ReplyDeleteMelinda Rose @ PhoenixSouth HVAC