Katy Burton, Emma Walker & Elizabeth Graham
This year’s theme for the North Shields Dance Festival was ‘Creative Curriculum’. There were 23 schools participating which included over 500 pupils, ranging from nursery to year 12. St Thomas More was very well represented, with our students being involved in 6 dances from 5 different groups of dancers.
Year 5 and 6: Gifted and Talented students from various feeder schools came into St Thomas More to take part in a dance day. Through the course of this day they learnt a dance, which they then performed over two nights at the Dance Festival. Their performance was brilliant!
Year 7: 16 of our girls, who attend a local dance club, learnt a contemporary dance which they also performed over two nights at the Dance Festival. They were fantastic and it was lovely to see the youngest pupils at our school being a part of the festival.
Year 10: Performing Arts students worked alongside a choreographer from Dance City to create a musical theatre piece. It was their first time performing in the Dance Festival and they were amazing!
Year 11: Performing Arts students have been looking at ‘The Scream’ by Edvard Munch, from which they created a contemporary/urban fusion dance. It was a bit scary but amazing, they all performed brilliantly and really showed character throughout their performance.
Year 12: Performing Arts students performed two dances, one contemporary and one jazz. For our contemporary, we looked at Matthew Bourne’s work in ‘The Car Man’ and built our choreography from that. The dance was so beautiful and elegant, from the flowing movements to the purple lyrical dresses, it really was breath taking! For the jazz dance, we looked at Bob Fosse’s ‘Sweet Charity’. We looked closely at his awkward movements and his use of hands and props. The dance was very upbeat and got the crowd going.
Overall the dance festival was a great success, from the fantastic performances to the roar of applauses, and each night was a sell out!
