Learning Objectives

• Experience a dance production that takes you on multiple characters’ journeys to self-discovery and collective discovery.
• Explore how music and movement can tell stories without dialogue (or with limited verbal storytelling).
• Learn about some of the moves that comprise hip hop dance.

Education Standards Alignment

• DA: Re.7: Perceive and analyze artistic work.
• DA: Re8.1.5: Interpret meaning in a dance based on its movements. Explain how the movements communicate the main idea of the dance using basic dance terminology.
• DA: Cn.11: Relate artistic ideas and works with societal, cultural, and historical context to deepen understanding.

Common Core Standards

• ELA-LITERACY.CCRA.SL.2: Integrate and evaluate information presented in diverse media and formats, including visually, quantitatively, and orally.

(Social and Emotional Learning)

• Relationship Skills: This includes the capacities to communicate clearly, listen actively, cooperate, work collaboratively to problem solve and negotiate conflict constructively, navigate settings with differing social and cultural demands and opportunities, provide leadership, and seek or offer help when needed.
  • Communicating effectively
  • Seeking or offering support and help when needed
• Responsible Decision-Making: The abilities to make caring and constructive choices about personal behavior and social interactions across diverse situations. This includes the capacities to consider ethical standards and safety concerns, and to evaluate the benefits and consequences of various actions for personal, social, and collective well-being.
  • Reflecting on one’s role to promote personal, family, and community well-being
  • Demonstrating curiosity and open-mindedness
• Social Awareness: The abilities to understand the perspectives of and empathize with others, including those from diverse backgrounds, cultures, and contexts. This includes the capacities to feel compassion for others, understand broader historical and social norms for behavior in different settings, and recognize family, school, and community resources and supports.
  • Taking others’ perspectives
  • Demonstrating empathy and compassion
  • Showing concern for the feelings of others

What to Expect

Performance

• This performance is approximately 70 minutes.
• The show is a series of vignettes, or pieces, with clear transitions between the scenes. The transitions will be marked by changes in the lighting design, sound cues, and dancers on stage.
• Three of the vignettes include limited dialogue along with movement, body language, and expressions to the stories. The show is mostly nonverbal storytelling using dance, movement, and props.

Performers

• A diverse group of eight dancers perform hip hop moves and other dance styles with contemporary movement.
• Each dancer plays one character throughout the entire production.
• The first piece of the production opens with all dancers onstage, introducing to the audience each character that they will follow throughout the show.

Sound

• Pre-recorded music is played throughout the show. The music genres that will be heard include a variety of styles such as pop, hip hop, folk, funk, and old school R&B.
• Sometimes, the songs may be fast, up-tempo, and have strong beats. Sometimes, the songs may be slow and soft.
• Most of the songs will be music with lyrics, but there will also be instrumental songs as well.
• Sound effects to represent wind, rain, thunder, and fireworks will be heard throughout the production, along with other sounds such as door knocks, kitchen pots and pans, city noises, and cars.
• There is a gunshot sound effect that will be replaced for the sensory-friendly show with an animated dance move to show the impact of the action.

Lighting

• Lighting effects are used throughout the show on stage to enhance the entire production, playing a major role in depicting the settings, the characters’ moods, and the story climax.
• The lighting is different for each vignette, which helps set the mood, environment, and emotions of the characters.
• There may be brief blackouts to signal to the audience that a piece has ended.

Projections

• There will sometimes be images projected onto a large screen behind the dancers on the stage, such as to simulate a movie in a park or starry night skies.

Audience Interaction

• During one vignette, a dancer will go into the audience, but there will be no direct interaction between the dancer and the audience.
• The audience is encouraged to react verbally to a scene they are viewing if they are emotionally motivated to do so.

What to Bring

• Please bring any tools that will help make the experience comfortable for you! Some suggestions are: noise-canceling headphones, sunglasses or visors, fidgets, and communication devices.

Resources

• Review our .

Look and Listen for

Before you watch the performance, check out this list of important moments and ideas.

• As the show’s title hints, dancers will express the stories of characters in troubled relationships. For example:
  • A young woman tries to create her own life, but her family’s history of addiction derails the life she’s trying to rebuild.
  • A promising romantic relationship is destroyed by a close friend’s betrayal.
  • A brotherhood is stricken by grief after a young man gets confronted by police.

• SHAPESHIFT leaves much to the imagination of audience members, but the group does use a few distinctive elements, such as costumes, props, and lighting, to set the tone for their scenes. For example:
  • Listen for weather-related sounds. What might thunder hint to us about the upcoming scene? What about the sounds of the birds?
  • What specific lighting, costume, or set cues does SHAPESHIFT use to transmit information to audience members?

Think About

After you’ve experienced the performance, consider these questions:

• Why is the performance called Grey Skies Blue? What does the title mean to you?
• Memories, smells, and people spark and evoke feelings. What personal or current event or memory would you want to highlight and share through your own movement?
• In mythology and folklore, a “shapeshifter” is someone who can completely transform their physical form and change their identity at will. Why do you think that Ashley Selmer decided to name her dance company SHAPESHIFT?
• Dance is used to express ideas, emotions, and relationships by and between characters engaged in different (and sometimes difficult) lived experiences. The dancers communicate a range of feelings, including feelings of empathy and sympathy, with which their characters are wrestling. How does perspective-taking, or trying to understand the point of view of others, impact the ways that you unpack the character moments and the decisions that they make?

Just Move It

Grey Skies Blue incorporates hip hop dance into the program. Here are just a few terms you should know about hip hop moves:

• Popping: Fluid movements of the limbs, such as moving arms like an ocean wave, that emphasize contractions of isolated muscles.
• Locking: Snapping arms or legs into held positions, often at sharp angles, to accent a musical rhythm.
• Power Moves: Moves that are more acrobatic and require momentum, speed, strength, and control. Often, the breaker is supported by their upper body while the lower body spins or turns, as seen in the “windmill” or the “swipe.” Some power moves are borrowed from, or inspired by, gymnastics and martial arts.

• Freezes: Poses that the breaker holds, requiring a great deal of control. Freezes are often performed with the upper body or arms supporting the inverted breaker with legs held upward. Freezes often emphasize important beats in the music.
• Voguing: Using hard angles, rigid movements or joint “clicks,” and straight formation walking, voguing creates a fashion pose-like move. Hands are often used to “throw shade.”

To learn more about hip hop dance moves and the history of hip hop overall, visit our resource Hip Hop: A Culture of Vision and Voice.

Shaping and Shifting the Show

Choose a song whose topic or lyrics you especially like or personally relate to. Create four simple movements or “gestures” to bring the song’s story to life. What connections might you make between the words and your motions? How might your emotional motivations move with the instrumentation’s vibes? Then, keep adding steps. You’ve just SHAPESHIFTED!

For a deeper dive into how dance works as an artform, visit our Do You Wanna Dance? resource for a breakdown of the five elements of dance—body, action, space, time, and energy. (Teachers can use this media resource with the Elements of Dance lesson plan.)

Kennedy Center Education

The Vice President of Education is generously endowed by the

Generous support for educational programs at the Kennedy Center is provided by the U.S. Department of Education.

Gifts and grants to educational programs at the Kennedy Center are provided by The Paul M. Angell Family Foundation; Bank of America; Capital One; The Morris and Gwendolyn Cafritz Foundation; Carnegie Corporation of New York; The Ednah Root Foundation; Harman Family Foundation; William R. Kenan, Jr. Charitable Trust; the Kimsey Endowment; The Kiplinger Foundation; Laird Norton Family Foundation; Lois and Richard England Family Foundation; Dr. Gary Mather and Ms. Christina Co Mather; The Markow Totevy Foundation; Dr. Gerald and Paula McNichols Foundation; The Morningstar Foundation; Myra and Leura Younker Endowment Fund; The Irene Pollin Audience Development and Community Engagement Initiatives;

Prince Charitable Trusts; Dr. Deborah Rose and Dr. Jan A. J. Stolwijk; Rosemary Kennedy Education Fund; The Embassy of the United Arab Emirates; The Victory Foundation; The Volgenau Foundation; Volkswagen Group of America; Jackie Washington; GRoW @ Annenberg and Gregory Annenberg Weingarten and Family; Wells Fargo; and generous contributors to the Abe Fortas Memorial Fund and by a major gift to the fund from the late Carolyn E. Agger, widow of Abe Fortas. Additional support is provided by the National Committee for the Performing Arts..

The content of these programs may have been developed under a grant from the U.S. Department of Education but does not necessarily represent the policy of the U.S. Department of Education. You should not assume endorsement by the federal government.