Dance and Zumba Season 1 reflection
In this service, we work with people who have had issues in the past that have to watched under careful supervision in confined environments. We went to Hougang Care Centre and onto their website (link attached) to learn more about the centre and about the members that will be joining us. Although it wasn’t extremely specific information, we were able to understand that they require time to do things they enjoy and meet people outside the confines of the centre as they are not allowed to go out very often or on their own. By giving them an opportunity to learn dance and Zumba with UWC is a way for them to express themselves and relax. We have to keep this in mind for the future when we plan out dances for them. We have to make sure that they are able to keep up with the pace and instructions. We also learnt that not all of them speak English so we expect there to be a language barrier. However, we plan to overcome this by being conscious about our word choice, to ensure we don’t use complicated words, and by speaking slow, in order to make ourselves more understandable to them. We have planned to divide up into pairs or threes and alternate every session, this way everyone has a chance to lead the service and have a chance to plan and arrange the activities. Initially, we decided to choreograph simple dances as we could alter steps when we feel that they are getting confused or tired. However, after trying this, we realised that a lot of us don’t have experience with dancing and choreographing, we just have a passion for it. Because of this, many of us couldn’t choreograph dances. We then had to find another way to get them to dance, so we decided on using Zumba videos online and play them on the projector for them to follow.
Furthermore, we made a doc in which we put in what activities we were planning to do, including links of the videos we want to use and the names of the people leading. We chose to make this very detailed by including when there would be breaks and for how long, as well as the extra resources that are needed so that we can make arrangements before the session.
