WHY A DANCE COMPANY?

RDT is uniquely qualified to champion this “first of its kind” Green Map-dance project. Nationally recognized for its commitment to arts-in-education since 1966, RDT’s “award winning” movement classes, workshops and performances have provided ways for individuals to become complex thinkers and problem solvers, effective communicators, cooperative group participants and leaders. The language of Movement is a powerful communication tool. RDT can help students experience and interpret the world directly through movement to open avenues of awareness that will increase self-worth, develop self-confidence, encourage understanding and consideration for others, and provide opportunities to create and to explore. RDT’s dance activities can help students validate who they are and how they relate to the life of the community and the world at large. Students with a rich background in the arts are more likely to become contributors to the community, quality workers and producers, and self-directed learners.

DANCING THE GREEN MAP

RDT will use the Green Map icons to inspire the creation of a movement language and give an artistic identity to the symbols that surface from the research gathered by students as they become more aware of established and potential green enterprises in their surroundings. This information will ultimately be the inspiration for a theatrical dance production in the Rose Wagner Performing Arts Center in 2011 utilizing the Green Map information gathered by students including essays, multi-media, and movement material relating to the mapped sites as a celebration of “place.”

GOALS

The Green Map Process will:

• Create a map that can be a useful tool for eco-tourism, education, neighborhood re-vitalization.
• Create a new “integrated” arts-in-education residency that can be replicated in communities throughout the nation.
• Inspire community action and partnerships with diverse community groups and organizations in order to empower participants with understanding of their environment, economy, history, culture and trends.
• Recruit schools, neighborhood groups, community councils, municipal governments, environmental and social organizations, and agencies of state and federal governments to participate in the Green Map synthesis, to construct a dynamic mirror to our ‘place.’
• Celebrate environmental progress and encourage environmental responsibility.

Using the art of dance, RDT’s Green Map Project will:

• Develop greater awareness of the relationship we have with each other, with nature, and with the world community to promote human understanding, compassion and tolerance.
• Create movement language expressing Green Map ® icons to expand human inter-relatedness and communication.
• Increase knowledge about the complex inter-relation of land, plants, animals and humans, the web of life.
• Encourage sustainability by helping people make choices that produce energy efficiency, conservation, and renewable energy.
• Promote an appreciation for history while stimulating an appetite for discovery and exploration.
• Ignite the imaginations of young people while developing life-long learning skills
• Encourage students to become contributing, productive citizens by providing alternative ways of learning in order to achieve basic educational objectives such as concentrating, creative problem solving, planning, visualizing and conceptualizing.
• Create dance performances, integrating Green Map ® icon pattern vocabulary, incorporating movement, music, and other arts based on Green Map inventory.