Year 8 Arts Electives

Dance

Year 8 Dance Composition

Have you heard of JaQuel Knight, Richard Jackson or Ashley Wallen?

These are the brilliant choreographers of Beyonce’s ‘Single Ladies’, Lady Gaga’s ‘Born This Way’ and ‘The Greatest Showman. It’s time to put your creative hats on and go toe to toe with the best.

Students study various aspects of modern dance and choreographic devices. They work in small groups to create dance pieces in a specific style of dance, acting as choreographers to groups of students from the Early Years Campus. Students need to select suitable dance elements to communicate their movements in an expressive way. They learn about the structure of a safe dance warm up and develop and deliver one of their own. They work individually to study a dance choreographer and their dance making processes, presenting a research assignment on their chosen choreographer. Students are able to work on their own technique and control of physical and expressive skills within the class. Students focus on skill development and improvement and participate in learning a class dance to perform in front of an audience.

Dance Clips

Get ready for Lip Sync Battle, Hotline Bling and iMovie to the extreme. Let’s make a dance clip!  Students examine the development of dance video and film clips. They have the opportunity to create their own video clip inspired by YouTube. Students work with a range of dance choreographic techniques and learn about site-specific dance. Students identify the relationships between sound, film and choreography. Within thus collaborative dance-video unit, students work in small groups to create short film clips, displaying a range of film and editing techniques. The clips comprise of dance, music and story; conveyed through movement. They also analyse the work of others and explore changes in dance, costume and media over time.

Drama

Stage Arts

All the world's a stage" said Shakespeare. Creativity is always a leap of faith, an opportunity to explore, to be someone else, to walk in another persons shoes. In Stage Arts students will develop their understanding of the key concepts of the stage, specifically Stagecraft Elements, including Costume, Lighting, Props and Sound. Students will incorporate and manipulate stagecraft to show how it can be used to explore meaning in their own devised performances, and the performances of their peers.

Visual Arts

Art 

Creativity and problem-solving are wonderful and important life skills, both of which will be exercised in Visual Art. Students will be challenged to design and create artworks using tools, materials, and processes that require careful planning and a specific procedure. Students learn to present and display their artworks effectively. They develop thinking and literacy skills by applying appropriate visual language with increasing complexity. At the end of this course, students will learn from intricate processes and to value what makes an artwork unique and gives it the human touch.