“The Dance Magnet Collection Has a Choreographer!”
January 25, 2022
By
Brenda Pugh McCutchen, creator and curator of
Dance Curriculum Designs™ (DCD)
If there is anything that brings me as much joy as creating Dance Curriculum Designs’ original line of dance education resources, it is to collaborate with others and curate special artistic works to enrich the DCD offerings which work together to stimulate imaginative teaching and add new dimensions to movement and dance education.
For nearly ten years DCD has offered two 12” tall shadow figures, hinged magnets for dance’s artistic process, performing, which the field has more than embraced. You have used the first jointed magnet, “The Dancer,” in your classrooms (and on your fridge at home) to give directions, demonstrate, introduce topics, remind students to “take off their shoes,” point to the big ideas of the lesson, and slither and slide all over your magnetic white board thanks to the enormous number of tiny magnets all over his body.
Many of you have found creative ways to involve the second one, a hinged ballet dancer magnet, “The Degas Dancer.” Fashioned after the famous Degas ballerinas, this in-profile ballerina demonstrates posture, gesture, joint action, gaze, flexion and extension, and other refinements of placement and alignment, as well as many of the dance elements.
Today we happily introduce the newest addition to DCD’s dancing line of shadow magnets—a third Rami Geller creation. This one’s for the artistic process, creating. Meet the “Choreographer,” the hinged dancing figure with an umbrella prop with which to create dances! “Ombrello, The Choreographer” is a fine addition to our website and to anyone’s dance collection. “The Choreographer” is offered individually at regular price and also as one of three in the magnet group called “The Dance Trio” (The Dancer, The Degas Dancer, The Choreographer) which saves $3.
DCD welcomes The Choreographer! Let’s create!!! Let’s respond!! Let’s dance!!
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Brenda Pugh McCutchen, created Dance Curriculum Designs™ for the 21st century in the year 2000 just as she began writing dance education’s foundation textbook for higher education for undergraduate and graduate studies. While writing this text, Teaching Dance as Art in Education (2006, Human Kinetics), McCutchen envisioned it as containing the “holistic theory” which also needed to be packaged with four teaching toolkits with creative catalysts—one kit for each artistic process–creating, performing, responding, and relating. Little did she realize the time it took to create and produce each toolkit is the same as writing an entire textbook because each toolkit is like the design of a textbook, just in separate pieces. Nonetheless, two kits are in print (one for critiquing and one for creating) and the newest kit (on dance composition) will be finished as soon as the manual is complete, so she looks forward to seeing it out soon.