Just a few class starter ideas for contemporary/modern classes. 

An observation from teaching  in workshops where you have less time to get to know the students or for them to know you, how do you brake the Ice and give confidence in a short time?

When you are  a guest teacher a replacement teacher or just the first few classes of the year , there is always that awkward moment of getting to know the students and gaining a bit of trust. “especially with children or teenagers.

 A nice plan was to  have a few “game style exercises” to start the class and get into the classes deeper work with a smooth transition from the out side world to the work space.

 I like to start with one Involving playing characters.

Each person can chose a character, we can do animals or emotions  or elements deepening on the age of the class or just change it up as seams fit. I lead them in moving around in the space as their chosen character/emotion,

 we run jump crawl breath etc.. then we jump from the most exaggerated version of this character, to the smallest hint of it,  all the while keeping  moving/traveling around  in the space. Then we might switch to another character repeat  from  extreme big to extreme  small, this I use to slowly fade us out and become our selves find a place in the room and enter the space as our own self and be ready for new information in our new body.

Sometimes I have us Imagine our names or say them to ourselves out loud  and enter the class room /work space - ( even not bad for a professional class  to enter space,  to separate us from the world we just came from and allow us to focus on the goal for that class.

 I think separating where we were just before class and giving some importance to the “work space” really makes a difference in the way students can appreciate and participate in class and how a dancer can detach from outside life and into the demanded concentration and presence in the work day, I have noticed when this trasition is too abrupt it is harder for students to ever leav what the were thinking about before and enter the moment.

 So this was a  little trick to get kids to stop running around who might be still in after school play mode,  teens who can't put  get their school day out of mind, or  just when needing to wake up  and plunge into  warm up class.

One more  game I find nice  can be to pretend to put on and off different kinds of emotional or character masks or to put them on each other, all while moving around the space and slowly bringing us back to our natural selves we might be more awake and aware now after living maybe three extreme emotional  masks we are ready to be our selves and to be present for the class and world in front of us.