Strike a Pose

While many sizzled in Thursday’s high heat and strong sunshine, everyone in the Art Room kept it cool and enjoyed a relaxing time exploring ideas of energy and movement without even breaking a sweat!  With a nod to International Dance Day, which was celebrated on 29 April 2025, we explored the theme of dance in art and focused on how even the most simple figure can convey almost boundless emotion, vigour and endeavour.

Our preschoolers had a ball in our morning and afternoon ArtPlay sessions by creating their very own dancing puppets. With the help of their grown-ups, our smallest artists assembled the different parts of their figure’s body with split pins to form a dancer that was personalised with crayons and fabric, ribbons and wool ready for their colourful debut performances! We loved how the little details the children dreamt up really made their artworks their own and prompted the biggest smiles as their puppets came to life under the Art Room spotlight.

Our afterschool warm up provided lots of fun and giggles for our older artists: drawing stick people in a variety of poses in under ten seconds, this simple exercise demonstrated to the children how the simplest lines and forms can communicate a multitude of feelings and animate a figure conceived as art. Building confidence by sketching further stick figures in different dance poses and, taking inspiration from Alberto Giacometti’s stick-like bronze figure sculptures, the children had a wonderful time using their imagination to model their own three dimensional figure from large sheets of tin foil.  With careful rolling and scrunching, twisting and squeezing, limbs, head, torso and joints were formed with both balletic poise and dynamic stance.  Showcased on personalised dancefloors, each figure expressed the joy of dance and the excitement of creativity in equal measure.  Bravo to all our artists who undoubtedly put their best foot forward and showcased fantastic innovation whilst dancing to a different beat!