Dance class provides a variety of transferrable skills

The class is introduction to dance techniques. It's a Pathways course. So it's offered to anyone who would like to take it. You don't have to have any dance experience whatsoever. There are a lot of different skills that can be transferred from dance training. First of all, putting yourself in a situation that you may not be completely comfortable with and trying something new. And also there's a lot of teamwork and problem solving that we do in this class. We do a whole choreography project at the end of the semester where the students are in groups and they work together to create original compositions. So there's a lot of kind of creative thinking collaboration that goes on in this course. I think is really applicable to any course of study. I'm a freshman and general engineering. When you're an engineer, you're sitting on a computer all day. So if you want to take a class where you're moving around a lot, it's a lot about culture and how dance and culture are connected, how dance and the mind are connected. This is the first-class of my day, and I just feel like I can focus much better in a long day of classes after moving around and getting my muscles loose. A lot of our students are sitting in front of computers all day. I'm often sitting in front of a screen for much of the day. And so when I get to teach in the classes, I noticed that I feel more alive, more awake, more alert, and those students report that they feel the same way. I'm so excited about this collaboration with Dr. Stevens and the VT percussion ensemble. Dr. Stevens and I have worked together in the past on a couple of different creative project that we've been working together to have the students learning both the music and then a Mayan learning original movement. So we came in and we started at the very beginning of the semester, we kind of hit the ground running. I said, congratulations, you're all cast. If you want to be in the performance, you can. So anyone with any level of dance experience was able to participate. They came up with a lot of the movement material that you see in that performance. So we work together collaboratively as a group. And it goes really nicely, I think, with the piece that, that Dr. Stevens chose for us, which is called meditation for metal pipes. And it's a very kind of, we created sort of a walking meditation that goes along with it. That's the students are participating.