Search the California Content Standards

Enduring Understanding: Space, time, and energy are basic elements of dance.
Essential Question(s): How do dancers work with space, time and energy to communicate artistic expression?
Process Component(s): Express

Performance Standard(s):
a. Demonstrate locomotor and non-locomotor movements that change body shapes, levels, and facings. Move in straight, curved, and zigzagged pathways individually and with others. Find and return to place in space. b. Relate quick, moderate and slow movements to duration in time. Recognize steady beat and move to varying tempi of steady beat. c. Demonstrate movement characteristics along with descriptive vocabulary (e.g., use adverbs and adjectives that apply to movement).

Enduring Understanding: Dancers use the mind-body connection and develop the body as an instrument for artistry and artistic expression.
Essential Question(s): What must a dancer do to prepare the mind and body for artistic expression?
Process Component(s): Embody

Performance Standard(s):
a. Demonstrate a range of locomotor and non-locomotor movements, body patterning, body shapes, and directionality. b. Move safely in general space through a range of activities and group formations while maintaining and changing personal space. c. Modify movements and spatial arrangements upon request.

Enduring Understanding: Dance performance is an interaction between performer, production elements, and audience that heightens and amplifies artistic expression.
Essential Question(s): How does a dancer heighten artistry in a public performance?
Process Component(s): Present

Performance Standard(s):
a. Dance for others in a space where audience and performers occupy different areas. b. Explore the use of props to enhance performance.

Enduring Understanding: As dance is experienced, all personal experiences, knowledge, and contexts are integrated and synthesized to interpret meaning.
Essential Question(s): How does dance deepen our understanding of ourselves, other knowledge, and events around us?
Process Component(s): Synthesize

Performance Standard(s):
a. Find an experience expressed or portrayed in a dance that relates to a familiar experience. Identify the movements that communicate this experience. b. Discuss observations from a story. Identify ideas for dance movement and demonstrate the big ideas of the story.

Enduring Understanding: Dance literacy includes deep knowledge and perspectives about societal, cultural, historical, and community contexts.
Essential Question(s): How does knowing about societal, cultural, historical and community experiences expand dance literacy?
Process Component(s): Relate

Performance Standard(s):
Watch and/or perform a dance from a different culture and discuss or demonstrate the types of movement danced.

Enduring Understanding: Dance literacy includes deep knowledge and perspectives about societal, cultural, historical, and community contexts.
Essential Question(s): How does knowing about societal, cultural, historical and community experiences expand dance literacy?
Process Component(s): Relate

Performance Standard(s):
Observe a dance and relate the movement to the people or environment in which the dance was created and performed.

Enduring Understanding: As dance is experienced, all personal experiences, knowledge, and contexts are integrated and synthesized to interpret meaning.
Essential Question(s): How does dance deepen our understanding of ourselves, other knowledge, and events around us?
Process Component(s): Synthesize

Performance Standard(s):
a. Describe, create, and/or perform a dance that expresses personal meaning and explain how certain movements express this personal meaning. b. Respond to a dance work using an inquiry-based set of questions. Create movement using ideas from responses and explain how certain movements express a specific idea.

Enduring Understanding: Dance performance is an interaction between performer, production elements, and audience that heightens and amplifies artistic expression.
Essential Question(s): How does a dancer heighten artistry in a public performance?
Process Component(s): Present

Performance Standard(s):
a. Dance for and with others in a space where audience and performers occupy different areas. b. Use limited production elements.

Enduring Understanding: Dancers use the mind-body connection and develop the body as an instrument for artistry and artistic expression.
Essential Question(s): What must a dancer do to prepare the mind and body for artistic expression?
Process Component(s): Embody

Performance Standard(s):
a. Demonstrate a range of locomotor and non-locomotor movements, body patterning, and dance sequences that require moving through space using a variety of pathways. b. Move safely in a variety of spatial relationships and formations with other dancers, sharing and maintaining personal space. c. Repeat movements, with an awareness of self and others in space. Self-adjust and modify movements or placement upon request.

Enduring Understanding: Space, time, and energy are basic elements of dance.
Essential Question(s): How do dancers work with space, time and energy to communicate artistic expression?
Process Component(s): Express

Performance Standard(s):
a. Demonstrate clear directionality and intent when performing locomotor and non-locomotor movements that change body shapes, facings, and pathways in space. Identify symmetrical and asymmetrical body shapes and examine relationships between body parts. b. Identify the length of time a movement or phrase takes (e.g., whether it is long or short). Identify and move on the downbeat in duple and triple meter. Correlate metric phrasing with movement phrasing. c. Select and apply appropriate characteristics to movements (e.g., selecting specific adverbs and adjectives and apply them to movements). Demonstrate kinesthetic awareness while dancing the movement characteristics.