Audience Etiquette: more than listening skills

 

An important part of bringing safe dance practices into your classroom is creating an atmosphere where the children are respectful of their classmates’ artistic creations. In a perfect world, children would not need to be taught this. However, in a classroom situation many students will never have been to a live performance of any kind and the appropriate behavior protocols may be foreign to them. 

Why is Audience Etiquette Important?

Television series that involve dance competitions promote raucous cheering, whistling, and yelling out encouragement that is more at home in a sports arena than a theatre.  On television, entertainment is the major goal and having audiences engaged and excited keeps the ratings up.  

As with many other areas of education, context is important.  Respectful attention to dance, music and theatre performances become a part of teaching children about being an attentive and polite audience member and about what to expect as a maker and performer of dance.

In addition, it assists children in developing general listening skills.  Many dance activities are specifically designed to support SEL skills that include focusing attention, impulse control and delayed gratification, particularly in younger children.

Learning about how to conduct yourself in a theatre or at a performance also emphasizes the importance of being respectful to the creative work of others.  In a broader sense, it also teaches about how we value the arts.  Putting value on the arts will in turn show the students that you think that dance is an important part of their education and that it is worthy of their attention.

As watching each other perform and showing dance work is an essential part of responding, you also need students to be confident to create and show their work in the classroom.  Having a supportive classroom community can encourage more artistic risk taking when making and performing work.  This can result in promoting team building and reflection that supports a productive classroom environment.

Being willing to take a risk can encourage students to be more open to feedback from the teacher and other students.  They are more likely to ask and answer questions and in general take more control of their own learning.  These behaviours lead to greater resilience the development of leadership qualities.

Dance activities for being a good audience member

Dance Idea #1

Have a classroom discussion about the similarities and differences between watching a dance performance and watching a sporting competition.

Dance Idea #2

Ask students to consider how much more interesting a sport is to watch when you know the rules of the game.  What things would you need to know about a dance work to ‘know the rules of the game’? Consider the theme or story behind the dance, who the dancers and the choreographer are and what other dance works they may have done, what style of dance it is and any similarities to dance the students may have done in class.

Dance Idea # 3

When watching peers’ dance in the classroom always include a pre-performance discussion.  It can helpful to have a list of elements that the students need to observe throughout the performance and support this with written questions that they then use as a starting point for post-activity discussions.  This is also relevant for watching professional performances in the theatre.

Dance Idea # 4

Try a role play activity where students take the roles of Usher, Audience member, and Performers.  Each person in the role play is given a scenario and the scene is then improvised.  The discussion that takes place after can lead to the students deciding on what is appropriate behavior as an audience member.  These then become the classroom rules for respectful audience behavior that can be displayed in the classroom.

Have fun dancing together

Reinforcing these audience behaviors in the classroom ensures that performing dance is a low-risk activity for the young dancers and fosters a classroom that is an inclusive and nurturing arts space. The dance activities that are a part of the Dance Teaching Ideas Premium Membership have responding activities for all Primary year levels to support children being a respectful dance audience.