Little Divas girls' program - February 22nd & March 1st
On February 22nd, we started a new theme and exploration which could be aptly titled, Flawless!
The next two sessions would be about recognizing different kinds of beauty, body positivity, and self-confidence! The girls all really like Beyoncé, so we decided to take a cue from her song "Flawless" to tie everything together for this theme.
We started this session off as usual with an ice-breaker discussion questions for the girls. We asked them to share their favourite thing about themselves and why, and their answers were both non-physical attributes about themselves and also particular aspects of their physical appearance. I was really glad to see that the girls did not immediately think only of physical characteristics when asked this question, but also of their personalities! We also played a brief ice-breaker game called Perfect Square/Circle, where the girls had to take a string with the ends tied together, and work together in teams of two to untangle the string and make a square or circle, all with their eyes closed. This was a great exercise for team-building, communication skills, and problem solving.
Next, we had a Flawless Silent Gallery for the girls to visit. There were various pictures hung on the walls, and the girls were told to silently walk around and look at the pictures and take them in, thinking about which pictures they found beautiful and why. Then the girls chose a few of the pictures each to bring back to the group and discuss what they thought was beautiful about each. Here are the pictures that were featured in the Flawless Silent Gallery:
As you can see, the Flawless Silent Gallery featured pictures of people who demonstrate "unconventional" beauty, but who are beautiful and Flawless nonetheless. We wanted to make sure to represent unique forms of beauty that are not shown in most mainstream media, to emphasize to the girls that there are countless ways to be beautiful, not just the ways popular media and advertising tell us.
We had seen and talked about how the girls love to dance a number of times in the Little Divas program prior to this week. The girls even did a dance battle at school and they filmed it to show us a while back! So we knew that we wanted to have the girls eventually use dance in one of our sessions, and what better theme to use dance with than body positivity and self-confidence! So our next major activity that would also continue into the following weeks was having the girls choreograph a dance routine to Beyoncé's song Flawless! We wanted the dance to creatively demonstrate the themes we were exploring, so we asked the girls to incorporate three specific "storytelling" elements into the dance:
The next two sessions would be about recognizing different kinds of beauty, body positivity, and self-confidence! The girls all really like Beyoncé, so we decided to take a cue from her song "Flawless" to tie everything together for this theme.
We started this session off as usual with an ice-breaker discussion questions for the girls. We asked them to share their favourite thing about themselves and why, and their answers were both non-physical attributes about themselves and also particular aspects of their physical appearance. I was really glad to see that the girls did not immediately think only of physical characteristics when asked this question, but also of their personalities! We also played a brief ice-breaker game called Perfect Square/Circle, where the girls had to take a string with the ends tied together, and work together in teams of two to untangle the string and make a square or circle, all with their eyes closed. This was a great exercise for team-building, communication skills, and problem solving.
Next, we had a Flawless Silent Gallery for the girls to visit. There were various pictures hung on the walls, and the girls were told to silently walk around and look at the pictures and take them in, thinking about which pictures they found beautiful and why. Then the girls chose a few of the pictures each to bring back to the group and discuss what they thought was beautiful about each. Here are the pictures that were featured in the Flawless Silent Gallery:
As you can see, the Flawless Silent Gallery featured pictures of people who demonstrate "unconventional" beauty, but who are beautiful and Flawless nonetheless. We wanted to make sure to represent unique forms of beauty that are not shown in most mainstream media, to emphasize to the girls that there are countless ways to be beautiful, not just the ways popular media and advertising tell us.
We had seen and talked about how the girls love to dance a number of times in the Little Divas program prior to this week. The girls even did a dance battle at school and they filmed it to show us a while back! So we knew that we wanted to have the girls eventually use dance in one of our sessions, and what better theme to use dance with than body positivity and self-confidence! So our next major activity that would also continue into the following weeks was having the girls choreograph a dance routine to Beyoncé's song Flawless! We wanted the dance to creatively demonstrate the themes we were exploring, so we asked the girls to incorporate three specific "storytelling" elements into the dance:
- One move demonstrating what makes each of you flawless
- One move appreciating how someone else is flawless
- One move acting out a time when someone was told they weren't flawless.
The girls are so amazing at creating dance choreography that they didn't even bat an eyelash at having to incorporate these specific elements into the dance, and they did it flawlessly! (Pun intended.) The rest of the day's session was spent choreographing, practicing, and perfecting the dance, and we revealed to the girls that next week we would be filming the dance in Regent Park Focus' green screen studio for a music video kind of effect! They were extremely excited about this, and recalled the last time they got to use the professional equipment and facilities at Regent Park Focus to record their own original hip-hop song Girls Like Us.
When we came back together the next week, we didn't structure the session in the same way we usually do, because we had limited time to film the dance in the green screen studio. We started by having the girls brainstorm some ideas for what the background could look like that would be shown on the green screen in the final video. We also had one participant who was absent the previous week when the dance was choreographed, and she isn't really into dance anyway, so we decided to have the girls create some signs that she could hold up at parts throughout the video to emphasize the themes we were exploring. I think it actually ended up being a great creative choice, and it will punctuate the dance video to really drive home the themes and ideas. The girls then got into their costumes (which were just matching outfits, nothing too elaborate, but still very effective) and did a couple practice runs of the dance before we headed downstairs into the green screen studio.
We were very lucky to have the help of two Regent Park Focus staff, Dimitrije and Tyrone, to do the filming for the video. Because of the way the green screen studio is set up, we had to make some tweaks and adjustments to the girls' spacing for the dance, but luckily nothing significant needed to be changed in terms of the actual choreography. This was also an interesting opportunity for the girls to learn about camera work and staging, as well as the technology and technique behind green screen imaging. We had two cameras filming, so we got some wide shots of the whole group, as well as some closer shots to show some of the emotion and facial expressions the girls were serving us while they did the dance. You could tell that when we got into that professional environment the girls really came into their self-confidence with the dance, and were able to emote and give great performances not just with the choreography, but also with their acting to give the choreography life! We had told the girls to think about how fierce and amazing and beautiful and flawless they all are while doing the dance, but you could really see all those things come out once we were filming, and you could also see how much fun they were having with it and how much they enjoyed it! We also isolated a few specific moments of the choreography and filmed those sequences on their own, so that it could be edited together to include different camera angles and movement, as well as perfecting the isolated parts of the choreography without worrying about the parts that came before or after. Then we finished off by filming the participant who wasn't doing the dance as she held and displayed the signs/artwork that the girls created earlier. Those clips of her would be interspliced throughout the video to emphasize the themes we were looking at over the past two weeks, as well as the overarching theme of feminism that comes up in almost all of our sessions, whether directly or indirectly.
The girls were very excited about the whole experience, and they really seemed to enjoy themselves. You could see their passion and joy throughout the whole project, and most of them said that this was one of their top activities from the entire program. We know just how flawless they are every single week, but I think this project in particular allowed them to see themselves in the same way, and it really seemed to build their self-confidence. I think they did Beyoncé proud.
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