BLOG 7: RELEVE, RELEASE, REPEAT

By: Mary Marsha F. Gemino

September 15, 2021

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RELEVÉ, RELEASE, REPEAT

Five, six, seven, eight--admit it, there’s a certain rhythm whenever you see these numbers in this certain order. It sounds like an agitated class leader slowly losing their voice, smells like sweat, feels like sore arms and scratchy costumes, and the smooth coating of a basketball court beneath your leather shoe-clad feet.

For the more--ahem--advanced members of society out there, this would be more familiar: boom, tak, boom boom tak. It’s reminiscent of an alien language, no? Nevertheless, only your classmates who could understand this way of counting beats and choreography carry the performance, sometimes leaving you in awe of their natural confidence in grooving, and the way they seem to eat up the sequence of steps.

HOPE--this is what greets the eyes as you open the Physical Education 3 course on the AnimoSpace. With the restrictions brought upon by the COVID-19 pandemic, classes have remained online. A quote by Samuel Beckett soon follows, “Dance first. Think later. It’s the natural order.”. In the midst of this pandemic, hope has kind of blurred into toxic positivity--and it shouldn’t. While HOPE 3 stands for Health Optimizing Physical Education, its abbreviation can stand up on its own, too. Hope for everyone’s health and safety.

Physical education courses have always been a bit embarrassing to do performance tasks for--especially in the time of online classes where even the slightest thing, like a dog barking or someone walking behind your back, is so visible to everyone. Plus points for not having collective embarrassment--this pandemic has clearly taken away the great experience of just copying the people in front of us whenever we perform, or letting mistakes happen and laughing it off because we can only do it once and that’s it.

However, the best things that came out of this is the freedom in our outputs, as well as being able to learn at our own pace. While HOPE 3 still utilizes synchronous meetings with the cameras on for learning most of the basic jazz dance steps, all of its “scaffolds” gave great prompts. It is not a monotone assignment wherein it just states to do this choreography or demonstrate these fundamental steps; the HOPE 3 scaffolds have themes that really challenge the student-dancer to actually internalize the meaning of dance, and not just merely perform for the sake of their grades.

This course aims to make the student an active advocate for lifelong fitness and health, in line with its goal of teaching dance as an optimal physical activity to achieve lifelong fitness. The student can realize these through both the physical, mental, and emotional aspects. The asynchronous modules available on the course focus on the great effects of dancing on one’s mental and emotional health. The prompts on each scaffold have relevance to a student’s current state, catered to the health restrictions in the Philippines, and promote dancing not only to the student but to their families and friends.