Dance Education Essay

Dance. A Power to change lives. Dance can be defined as the way a person uses his or her body to express emotions without words. Dance is then a language of expressing what is not possible to say with words. Dance, as an art´s subject in school, is more than a mere physical activity; it has the role of helping students both in a social and cognitive way. Social in the way it shapes their identity and helps them express their deepest feelings, and cognitive in the way it increases their motor connections in the brain and creates more body-brain connections.

In today´s education, where the main aim is to prepare kids for a system based on economical growth and mass industrialization, there is Little or no time for art because what we really

Giving kids and young adults the space to become them selves with no rules, no judging from others, and no expectation of right and wrong is an extremely rich opportunity for them to discover or rediscover their identity. In dance classes, or at least the ones that focus mostly on developing the creative side of dance, students have the chance to express freely and be themselves for a short time. In the book Dance Education Around the World, Isto Turpeinen (Svendler & Burridge, 2015) describes his experience with chaos in his dance classes as moment for dialog, “In my classes, I use a working style where I see the dance studio as a forum. Children have a space for action. It is a kind of chaotic state in which the construction of dance starts” writes Turpeinen in his anecdote as a dance teacher with youngsters, “working with a raw-board method opens a space for personal action and experience and creates a space for shared and personal processes of dance and the dancing self. This is a complex situation for a class seen from the outside because everything is chaotic and no ideal order is seen; however, they are constructing dance through their experience”, they are learning to identify with their bodies and their own space. This own space that is created in the dance classroom leads to self-identification. When a person discovers his own identity he or she is more able to deal with the day to day situations that life presents and will be a more secure person to overcome obstacles in life. This space is also very keen of creating a much better understanding between peers of different personalities. When one person identifies himself, it is easier to create a sense of empathy with the other. For the social and personal benefits that dance