Department of Dance

Kinnect Teaches BYU Students to Connect Through Dance

by Leah Hill

BYU senior Josh Mora walked into the third grade class to see a room full of 8-year-olds staring up at him from their desks. He explained to the students that today they were going to use movement to understand classroom concepts. Soon the children were moving their arms and legs in different ways, excited to learn there is no wrong way to do creative dance.

After the lesson, the teacher thanked Mora and his teaching partner for involving a child usually isolated from the others because of a language barrier. She noticed he was one of the first to start dancing, making him almost a leader in the activity and winning acceptance from his peers.

“From that I learned that you never know the back story of the children you are teaching or even the lives you are going to touch,” said Mora. “To us that was just a child volunteering. But to that teacher, that was a student that she struggled with to get involved and open up.”

Mora is a member of Kinnect, a BYU contemporary dance company that provides community outreach services. The company gives its members a variety of teaching opportunities and helps them develop creative choreography and performing skills.

Kinnect members spend their class time winter semester brainstorming and creating dances for future performances at elementary schools. For the first three weeks of spring semester students perform their choreographed dances every school day for children at local elementary schools. After each performance, members teach dance workshops to the children, encouraging them to learn and express themselves through movement.

“Being in Kinnect is the school of authentic experience because BYU dancers learn how to teach by teaching real students out in real schools,” said Berrett, creator of Kinnect and chair of the Dance Department. “There is nothing that beats seeing a child delight in something they have just created. Our Kinnect dancers have these kind of experiences frequently.”

Rachelle Baker, a sophomore dance education major and member of Kinnect, said the company is unique because it gives members the opportunity to grow extensively in all three areas of dance.

“We have the opportunity to create, perform, and teach—and we get to do a lot of each one,” Baker said. “Many companies focus on one or two of these aspects, such as creating and then performing. Few companies get the opportunity to do all three.”

First-year Kinnect members also attend a teaching methods course to prepare them to effectively teach the creative process to children at various levels of learning.

Dancers usually teach three 30-minute workshops after any given performance, either in pairs or by themselves.

“[Something unique about teaching the workshops is that] you have never seen the children before and you will never see them again,” said Jessica Wilson, a senior dance major. “You have half an hour to do something creative with them, half an hour to leave them with something worthwhile.”

Wilson said teaching 11-year-olds, who sometimes are unsure of their bodies and are nervous to move, is drastically different than teaching 5-year-olds who usually express themselves through movement every day.

“You can go from kindergarten to teaching sixth grade and have to switch your whole demeanor as a teacher because they are so different in their development and what they understand,” Wilson said.

Kinnect members also face the challenge of relating creative dance in a way that both boys and girls can enjoy, whether it’s through snowboarding, superheroes or building Legos.

“Teaching is a lot more challenging than I thought it would be, partially because I always imagined myself teaching high school students,” Baker said. “Although it is difficult it is so much more rewarding than I thought it would be as well. To be able to work with the children and see their levels of creativity at such a young age—to me it’s a miracle how creative these children can be when they have never done creative dance before.”

The teaching methods course focuses on deepening children’s understanding and comprehension of concepts they are already learning in class by integrating movement.

Kinnect members use maps, books like Where the Wild Things Are, and other aids to engage the children. They may ask children to show through movement the energy of a swimming fish versus the energy in the reaction of a person touching a cactus.

“Our aim is to engage students quickly and deeply, so we use materials and visual aids to interest and captivate the children,” Berrett said.

For last year’s theme “Klassroom Kinnections,” members connected the classroom to dance, performing dances about math, science, language and art for the children.

“When we first come into rehearsal, we don’t have a theme,” Wilson said. “We don’t have anything for the show yet at all. So we are starting from scratch and work forward.”

To help Kinnect members choreograph dances for the performance, the artistic director guides them in improvisation activities, where they create dances based on a selected theme or topic. From the activities, the members choose and develop the most captivating pieces and then incorporate them into their performance.

“It’s kind of a recycling process where you create something and you see if it works and if it doesn’t you throw it away and start over again,” Baker said. “It can be exhausting in that way because not everything you create gets used and a lot of times it takes time and time again for things to work out.”

The activities are designed to stretch student’s choreography abilities and encourage every member to contribute.

“We are in an environment that allows you to not only dance but express yourself in a way that you become vulnerable,” said Mora. “Because you are not just learning choreography; you’re putting a piece of yourself into the artwork along with everyone else.”

During one class, members discussed the evolution of technology and then divided into groups to create dances. Groups used the idea of directions and a GPS to create unique choreography.

“It’s rough sometimes because you always have days where you don’t really feel like creating, where everyone’s tired and hungry,” Baker said. “That’s why we have to be so close. When someone is having a hard day, you just have to pull them along with you. And you have really got to try and inspire each other, so it can be challenging.”

Although being a part of the company is difficult at times, members enjoy seeing how far they have come.

Mora said after he first taught a kindergarten workshop with another Kinnect member, he didn’t know if he could do it again.

“By the end of the class, if you picture some horror movie where two people are clutching each other, afraid that they are going to be attacked, that was us,” Mora said. “It was so scary.”

A few weeks later Mora taught another kindergarten class and was told afterwards by the teacher that he captured the children’s attention and taught at their level, a drastic improvement from the previous class. Mora credits this achievement to Berrett, who often reminds the students to keep the focus on the children.

“You can try to get them to use cool tricks, focus on the dance and technique; but creative dance is all about the individual and about the child,” Mora said. “When you focus on that then you are going to be inspiring lives.”

Students audition for the company in the fall. Those admitted register for a teaching methods course and for Kinnect rehearsal credit.