Dance to stay fit

  • Location
    Manhattan, New York
  • Status
    Complete

The Problem

In this era when you can travel the world and even go to outer space with a swish of your finger and click of a button, few kids feel the need to move. Childhood and even teenager obesity is on the rise. Infact, 9 million American teenagers below the age of 15 years are obese right now. As soon as you are half way through middle school, you start preferring either books or sports. So you get labelled as a nerd or a jock. Us book loving people have a sharp mind but tend to develop unhealthy habits and are more prone to obesity. Obesity can lead to low self esteem, high blood pressure, diabetes, heart attacks, strokes and early death. We on the other hand love to learn new things. So I came up with an idea to teach Bollywood dance to my friends. It’s a dance form that is constantly evolving, there are no fixed set of rules or technique, it encourages innovative steps. The music is catchy and you don’t need to hold a beat to dance. You can dance alone, in a pair and even in a group. With Bollywood – you can’t DO NO WRONG! My wish is to make every middle schooler move. And have a great time doing it. Come up with new dance moves, teach other kids and have the whole community on their feet! It will give us girls a voice, make us more confident and bring us together as a community. GIRL POWER!

Our Plan

I started about 2 months ago, by teaching my friend Ella a few basic steps during lunch break. She had never danced Bollywood before but she was dancing like a pro in 3 days (3 lunch breaks). Then we made a video of a 30 second dance sketch. We broke each step down and first went over the leg movements and then the hand movements. We then sent it to 5 other girls who never danced in their whole life. They are “proof reading” the video. In the third week of April, I will ask them to demonstrate what they learnt. This is a great form of feedback as it will tell me how effective the video demonstration was. I will then tweak (or reshoot if need be) my 30 second video. We call ourselves “Dance 6-7-8” are in the planning to go to a local private school on April 28th and teach them a few steps (dance workshop) . Once they are more confident, I will send them the video and encourage them to teach other kids. I'm going to upload the teaching video on this site, please try it and let me know how it went. Thanks, Avni Garg click or copy paste to see the video https://vimeo.com/212439083 4-22-17 This project is moving slowly, but today Ella and I will teach Diya the dance and hopefully on Monday, we will showcase it to our school. We are still "on" for the presentation on 4-28-17. We need 50.00 for the costumes by 50.00... any donors? 4-28-17 We did a workshop for 25 kids aged 7-14 at Staten Island Academy. We were asked to perform at their international night. A few mothers joined in as well.

Themes Addressed

  • term icon
    Community

The Benefit

Here is how the project went:

it went very well. We are teching dance via zoom

Through this project I/we learned:

that teamwork is essential

What I/we might change:

offer zoom classes from the very beginning

My/our favorite part of this project was:

dancing

Some tips, tricks or fun facts about the project:

allow people to let loose, don't judge

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