#dancing

The Theatre Shed: Shed’s Shorts Cabaret 2019

disability

The Theatre Shed is a charity which “is committed to raising aspirations of local children and young adults, irrespective of their background or ability through sustainable,wonderful innovative, inspiring and inclusive theatre”. At Theatre Shed we use British Sign Language at our weekly workshops and in every production we do!

Recently at The Theatre Shed we performed for two nights only our fabulous 2019 cabaret show called Shed’s Shorts. For this show we all came up with our very own creations of performance work; From signing, dancing, poems and more.

I was in a dance group we decided we wanted to do a dance using a song from The Greatest Showman. The song we chose was The Greatest Show.

We came up with our own dance routine; as the song is quite big and the opening we wanted to keep the dance simple but also make a big statement.

For the dance we used big hoops with different colour ribbons on to create more interesting movement. We wore non patterned simple clothes to help the dance have more impact as we wanted the ribboned hoops to be the star of our dance routine.

During some of our dance we did not use the hoops instead we used simple big movements with our body. We then used the hoops again but this time making interesting shapes with our hoops.

Through out our dance we used different levels by doing this our dance became more interesting and engaging for the audience.

At the end of the show all the cast came together on stage to perform the song Think Like A River from our Christmas Production The Snow Queen 2018.

If you would like to know more about The Theatre Shed and the amazing things we do or you can donate to The Theatre Shed by becoming a Shedlight please visit:https://thetheatreshed.co.uk

Dance and Disability

disability

Every week I have dance class workshops at the theatre groups I attend. When I was younger I also did ballet class once a week. Over the past couple of years I have noticed that dance has a positive impact on my disability. Here are a few ways dancing has helped my disability:

1. Dance does not just help me to stay more fit and active; I find that sometimes dance can help me to express my emotions through a creative outlet without me having to talk to express my emotions and thoughts.

2. Dance helps me to improve my balance as we do a lot of warm up activities that make us need to focus on our balance but also I may need to balance when preparing to do high kicks in our dance routines or fast turns.

3. My disability makes it really hard for me to know the sequence of events. So having to do a dance routine really helps me to work on ways to try and remember a sequence due to the fact that our dances have lots of fast moves one after the other and can be quite quick.

4. I find that we have to use our core muscles a lot to help us stay up right when doing kicks or lifts. So I have found that my upper body strength is improving and that I am able to use my core muscles a lot better now when dancing.

5. I find eye, hand coordination tricky at times however dance helps me to use different parts of my body at the same time. I have found that listening to the music when dancing helps me to keep the rhythm and beat of the dance I am doing.

6. I have found that dance has also helped me to loosen and relax my hand strings. This has helped me a lot as I know can get dismount of the horses and ponies I ride as well as when I am in my riding lessons my legs are more relaxed and not so tight gripping onto the horse.