By DAVID DUPONT
BG Independent News
Music and dance feeds the soul, and the Black Swamp Fine Arts School is serving up a buffet of exploratory summer courses for young people ages 7 through high school.
Jennifer Blakeman, the director of early education at the studio, said this summer, instead of camps, the school will offer fun youth classes to help give students a taste of the arts.
Those are Strum and Drum and Community Dances with Miss Jen as well as a series of summer dance samplers for teens who have had no, or little, formal dance training. The hour-long dance classes will offer an introduction to various dance techniques – ballet, tap, modern, and eurhythmics.
Blakeman will teach both the Strum and Drum, for ages 7-13 (the class may be split if enrollment merits) and Community Dances for ages 10 through teens.
In both cases all students are required to do is come and enjoy.
In Strum and Drum, Blakeman said, students will play music games with balloons, stretchy bands, parachutes, bucket drums, hand drums, barred instruments, and body percussion.” If someone has a ukulele, they are invited to bring that in as well.
The barred instruments, often known as Orff instruments, are percussive keyboards, akin to a xylophone. Some bars can be removed, Blakeman explained, so the instrument has a five-note scale like the black notes on the piano.
That means whatever is played won’t clash. “So, you will sound and feel successful and be able to blend,” she said.
Playing the barred instruments, ukuleles, and the varieties of percussion, everyone can make music together. It’s a musical buffet that allows students to try a variety of instruments.
“The synergy that comes from community music making feeds your soul,” Blakeman said. “That’s what makes us human. That’s at the heart of the whole studio.”
The Community Dancing also follows that mission. The class, for youngsters 10 and up, teaches set dances, contradancing, and circle dancing.
These are dances where “you’re holding hands and working together as a team,” she said. “It’s so fun.”
The pairing is gender neutral. The two sides may be designated the peanut butters and the jellies, or the rocks and the rolls.
Once the staple of community life, this kind of dancing has “fallen out of favor in our culture, which is sad because it’s so integral to our humanity and how we connect with our neighbors,” she said.
Blakeman is a certified music teacher who teaches both at the Black Swamp Fine Arts School and at the Bowling Green Montessori School.
The Community Dances will be offered Mondays from 5-6 p.m. at the school at 419 Gould St., BG.
The Strum and Drum will be offered twice on Tuesdays at 11:15 and 4 p.m.
Classes begin next week, and run for six weeks with one week off during the week of July 4th.
Decisions on whether to offer classes will be made Wednesday June 6.
