Videos to Dance, Draw, and Create Origami with Your Little Ones
Since COVID-19 has made it impossible for our Welcome Project classes to take place in person, we’ve been thinking creatively about how to take some of the feelgood benefits of dance and movement to our participants in Brighton & Hove.
Dance Artist Takeshi Matsumoto has drawn on Japanese tradition to create two videos with fun and stimulating activities for young children. The first, Dance Oto (Oto means ‘sound’ in Japanese), explores a mix of sound, drawing and dancing. It invites the children to imagine the sound that Takeshi makes with his violin as shapes and colours, and then to draw them. What if these drawings could dance? In an entertaining and engaging way, Takeshi asks the children to bring their drawings to life through dance.
The second video, Origami Dance, is named after the Japanese art of folding paper. Takeshi explains that animals, birds, insects and many more creatures can be made from one single sheet of paper. In the video children can learn how to fold origami and dance like the origami creatures they have created.
Originally created for the children of Puffin Nursery, located in the Tarner area of Brighton & Hove around The Dance Space, these videos are now available below for all children aged two and above and their families to enjoy.
Takeshi Matsumoto is currently working with children in Suffolk and Norfolk to explore origami and the concept of ‘animism’ – the belief that objects, places and creatures all possess a distinct spiritual essence – as part of our Little Big Dance programme. You can find out more about this by reading a conversation between Takeshi and Dr Angela Pickard here.