Wednesday 9 September 2015

Summer Festival - reenacting visual art

One of our favourite museums is The Museum of Childhood in Bethnal Green. This July we went to their Summer Festival which was largely a celebration of music and dance from around the world. 

The museum is set in a beautiful building. The acoustics were amazing, particularly when the South London Samba band played - you definitely felt the music move through your body as the drum beats echoed and filled the cavernous space.


The boys were equally transfixed by the folk band "Tragic Roundabout" which featured a clarinet, one of S's favourite instruments.

I particularly wanted to see the Ecuadorean dancers, having spent some time teaching in coastal Ecuador before we had the boys.

Papa's favourite act was the juggler who put on a silent movie style show.

Without any prompting when we got home the boys started to reenact lot of what they had seen.

First was the samba drums. The boys stepped side to side in rhythmical jumps, their hands banging down on a imaginary drum, the beat coming from their voices.

S then wanted to be one of the Ecuadorian dancers who were adorned in flamboyant bird headdresses.  He used his owl suit which consists of an eye-patch mask and a cape wings. We put on some Latin music and they moved around the lounge, mimicking several moves they had seen the dancers make.


The juggling came the following day when S wanted to reenact the tricks the juggler performed where he catapulted teaspoons and sugar cubes into tea cups followed by flipping over a tea tray with its contents intact. 

S set out their play tea set ready to start. We talked about how maybe the juggler started with just one or two things and built up to a whole tea set. With this in mind S and A chose a single teacup with which to practise with. 





What visual arts have you re enacted at home?

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