Latin American Dance

For our Culture Day for Latin America, I had another student teacher Lynette Yorgason come in and teach my class about different dances.

It was fascinating to learn that every state in Mexico moves their skirt a different.  As a result, you can tell where someone lives by the way you move you skirt. This is great to emphasize with students because it helps them see that there are differences within Latin American culture.

Here are the three different dances that were learned about:

 1) The dance from the Mexican state Jalisco.

This dance has you stomp your feet in triplets. You begin by stomping your right foot hard, then step with your left foot and then right foot.  Then you stomp hard on your left foot and do lighter steps on your right foot then left foot before you stomp hard on your right foot again.  You repeat this over and over again.

We had the class move in a circle clockwise stomping their feet.

The boys clasp their hands high behind their backs.  The girls pretend like their holding out a big skirt and moving it side by side.

The reason there is so much stomping of feet is because their music doesn't have a strong beat in it, so they make their own beat.

Type "Jalisco Dance" into YouTube for a video.

2) The dance Cumbia from Colombia.

This is an interesting dance because it shows the influence between the natives of Colombia and the African slaves.  The African slaves had chains around their ankles so they could only shuffle their feet. As a result, Cumbia dance is the shuffling of feet.  They made it more interesting by rotating their hips.  The women hold up large skirts and move their skirts around as they dance.  The men put one hand high on the back while they tip their hat and shuffle their feet.

Type "Cumbia Dance" into YouTube for a video.

3) The dance Capoeira from Brazil.

This is a fight dance.  I don't know too much beyond that and would need to do more research.  We didn't actually do this dance in class but we watched a video.  It is amazing because the entire dance is a choreographed fight.

The boys especially liked watching this video.

Look for this movie in YouTube: "The best capoeira video ever"

The students really enjoyed learning about the dances and participating in them as well.  I would definitely try to replicate this again. It took about 20 minutes to explain, dance and watch the video clips.