Let's Dance...with Year Three at Sacred Heart in Barrow.

 I got in touch with Sacred Heart around Christmas,  and since then I've got to know Ms Willis'  Year three class quite well, since as well as the sessions we've done for Reverb, I worked with them and two other groups from the school on Artgene's recent Sea Like A Mirror project with the RNLI. 

They really are a great and very diverse bunch of young people, skillful, communicative,  interesting and very funny.  In 20 years time they'll have their own memories of growing up in the town and their own ideas of how we should be doing things. I think we'll be in good hands.

We began our project by talking about dancing, and then doing a bit. The children were asked to freeze mid-dance, to notice a few of the positions their friends were in, and make a series of drawings that would form the basis of a four-step animation. They then made a bendy figure from two pipe-cleaners  fixed it to a base and, in groups, posed it for two cameras using their drawings a reference.

I then cleaned up the backgrounds in the stills, ran the frames together, and then reversed them, so each figure went through 8 stages of movement, with two camera angles to choose from. 

                      

And then we speeded it up.  

Next, in order to do something messy, we clad the figures in clay and let them dry.  The results are a a collection of chunky clay figures, and we make little plynths  with the plan to make statues of dancers...

However, it was suggested that the best statues, and ones that an audience would connect with the video, might be made from the pipecleaners...so we made some more, and decorated the statue plynths to look like the one in Ramsden square in Barrow...

I know from my work here, from the chats I've had while making it and from my own nights out that dancing has always been a big thing in Barrow.  People love it, and put their hearts and souls into doing it, to live bands, to DJs, to their own music collections...and they do it all over town.  It's a form of creative expression, and it can be wonderful to watch...

So maybe we need to commemorate the dancers of Barrow with some statues of them in action. 

Here are a few examples of the children's work, and our video....and we'll have more to show you as REVERB progresses.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/18aDzgUJoahDIvk0tqshFRrN1h_8GFl4t/view?usp=sharing

So thank you Year Three, Ms Willis and your support staff, it's been a real pleasure to meet you and work with you..