About a couple of weeks ago, I decided that I wanted to teach a Youth Tribe Choreography/Performance class. I knew I was onto something, because my Youth Tribe Training class has some really inspirational dancers in it, and I really wanted the chance to work with them and other, more serious dancers on a deeper level. The Youth Tribe is like a mini-Sol Vida Dance Ensemble as evidenced by Fridays class at 5:30. So far, we only have two students, but these two managed to work in a delightfully, incredible way. We began with a Reggae music warm up, and proceeded to explore the world of Contact Improvisation, we worked with the concept of creating choreography without music–accapella style. Wow! After creating the choreography, I had the girls try it to three different styles of music–dubstep, electronica dance, and African drumming. Ironically enough, the piece which has the ability to go with almost anything, really came out when they did it with Fatu, Lady Drummer‘s African drumming, it was the essence of Fusion dance, as I love it. They played with speed, and worked on creating their own changes to make the choreography fluid–and they did an amazing job, and left class saying “that was so awesome,” making me believe that I may have landed upon one of my dream youth classes of all time.

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