Contemporary Folk Dance Fusion

Information Video Audio PDF

By Kerry Fletcher, Katie Howson and Paul Scourfield

This resource is for dance teachers and dance artists working with students studying dance in secondary school. It is based on a project with KS5 A level students working across dance, drama and music at Impington Village College, Cambridge. It can easily be adapted to KS3 & 4 by pitching the creative tasks at the appropriate level and choosing an age/subject appropriate theme and song as the stimulus.

A video of the final piece, performed by Impington Village College students at The Full English Showcase Conference on 25 June 2014 at Town Hall Birmingham, is available by clicking on the video tab at the top of this panel.
Audio recordings of the tunes used in this resource, played by Katie Howson and Paul Scourfield, are available for free download on the audio tab at the top of this panel.
The pack detailing the work done on this project is available by clicking on the PDF tab at the top of this panel.

We developed the project using folk dance and music, as a new language for the students, to explore a narrative theme, from the stimulus of a folk song. We created a fusion of folk with contemporary dance with original arrangements of the traditional music. This was a new approach for us to employ folk dance language to inform contemporary dance movement and accompanying music by considering traditional material with a more dramatic eye. The work has since been used as a stimulus for further work in drama.

The school wanted a challenging theme and, we found them the song Lucy Wan, the story is one of incest & sororicide (sister murder) – they were excited! This is clearly a subject for much discussion and debate about moral issues and was used fully to explore the theme and inform the dance and music. It must be stressed that we discussed the content of the song with the school in advance, to approve the use of what could be controversial themes.

The song was collected from Charlotte Dann in Cottenham, 3.4 miles from the school, where one of the students lived. The students really enjoyed the pictures and information from the archives, especially knowing the material was collected close to where they live.

Prior to our first session, the students developed the theme ‘Love me or kill me’, whilst we chose tunes and dances from East Anglia, wherever possible from close to Impington and from within the archive. Our challenge was then to find a way to use the folk dances and tunes, to make them meaningful as a dance language and musical score, informed by the dramatic theme.