DANCE FOR THE VERY YOUNG: MOVEMENT, PLAY, AND RELATIONSHIP by Monica J. Cameron Frichtel As a dance educator, my classes have included participants spanning decades − infants, children, adults, and seniors. It has been a privilege to engage creatively with all of them through dance. Within this broad spectrum of ages, I have found that there is a unique energy that the youngest dancers − infants, babies and toddlers − bring to class. About seven years ago I had an opportunity to develop and teach a dance curriculum for this young cohort of students and their caregivers. Classes were offered in local libraries, a dance studio, and a multi-purpose community arts space. Recently, I have turned my attention to researching best practices in teaching children under age three and their adult caregivers. My study is informed by dance education literature and by conversations with expert teachers and artists who shared insights from their years of practice. One of the main outcomes of the study is the conceptualization of dance for the very young in terms of three interconnecting and overlapping dance processes—movement, play, and relationship. I would be remiss not to mention that others, including Luna Dance Institute,
have envisioned dance curriculum in similar ways. A more fully developed manuscript based on the study is set to be published by Palgrave MacMillan as a chapter in Dancing Across the Lifespan: Negotiating Age, Place, and Purpose, edited by Doug Risner, Pam Musil, and Karen Schupp.
Dance for the very young is a term borrowed from a theatre movement that began in London in the late 1970s, known as Theatre for the Very Young or TVY. TVY typically recognizes children under five and their adult caregivers as actively engaged audience members and participants. I envision dance for the very young in comparable ways, creating spaces for young children and their adult caregivers to move, create, play, connect, develop, and grow as members of communities. Understanding child development and how children come to know the world informs the choices dance educators make as they develop environments to support children and their caregivers.
MOVEMENT Young children come to understand the world through movement. This is the first way children begin to make meaning, according to Lev Vygotsky,
