Author: Tammy Lane • First Posted: Monday, July 14, 2008

 "We have turned this gym into a theater lab," Antoinette Crawford-Willis explained to the third- and fourth-graders assembled in the Millcreek Elementary School gymnasium.

  And with that, the dance educator who spent a week at Millcreek introduced classes of fifth-graders who took turns acting out scenes from history, demonstrating Appalachian and Native American dances, and sharing an African-American folk tale through movement. “It’s the gestures that tell a story,” she cautioned the audience.

  Aside from the students, the performance was attended by a smattering of parents with cameras in hand. The event capped the visit by Crawford-Willis, a retired ballet dancer from Louisville who now travels to schools as an artist-in-residence.

  “I’m teaching them, but they’re being entertained as well,” she said. “They retain it when they have fun.”

  The kids created simple costumes and props for the program, which included stand-alone scenes and dance excerpts from the Jamestown settlement to the American Revolution to the era of slavery.

  “We had to write the scripts, so we had to know what was going on (in that period),” said fifth-grader Presli Neal, whose class demonstrated the Cherokee two-step.

  In that ceremonial dance, young Native American girls picked their husbands (as pre-selected by their fathers) by draping a blanket over their shoulders and two-stepping back to their hut as a married couple.

  Classmate Landon Porter explained that some of the dances also re-enacted the Native Americans’ routine activities, such as planting.

  “I had a lot of fun acting out the scenes,” he said.

  Crawford-Willis had taken the children’s social studies textbook and selected key events from history – such as the signing of the Declaration of Independence and the Trail of Tears – for the students to dissect and interpret.

  “They’ll become the characters from the story,” she said before the performance, in which she projected the pictures on a screen behind the students.

  Everyone in each scene had a line to say; the kids also learned a new dance every day, including the African-American cakewalk.

  “The kids are picking it up very quickly,” she said.

  Crawford-Willis, who is on the advisory committee that writes the CATS questions, said she hoped her instruction would help the students during testing.

  “This is like a little prep for their CATS tests,” she said the Friday before testing began. “I simply want them to be able to write about dance – and to have fun.”

  Teacher Natalie Call said her students were able to connect what they had studied in class with the activities Crawford-Willis brought.

  “They look at the picture and interpret it into dance and use their bodies to express the feelings and emotions in the picture,” Call said. “We’re hoping it helps refresh their minds on earlier social studies topics and makes that tie between arts and humanities.”