Dance
Drama
Music
Visual Arts

The panoramic photographs of Manitoba landscapes in the website banners are used with the kind permission of © Stan Milosevic.

The “landscape” images and metaphor illustrated in the website banners represent current understandings about curriculum presented in the “Guiding Principles for WNCP Curriculum Framework Projects” (Western and Northern Canadian Protocol, 2011).

New ways of thinking about curriculum involve a “shift in the images we use, away from knowledge pictured as fragmented pieces put together, one piece at a time, in a linear fashion on an assembly line, to an image of knowledge as a complex organic network organized into living fields, territories or 'landscapes'. Learning about these living fields of knowledge requires: 'learning the landscape'.”

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Dance

The Nature of the Dance Discipline

Dance enriches a vibrant culture and is integral to human life. It has the power to illuminate, deepen, broaden, and enhance human experience. dance offers a unique way of perceiving, interpreting, and communicating diverse life worlds. As one of the oldest and most primal of the performing arts, dance has existed across all cultures and historical periods. It has always been a socially significant component of all civilizations, and remains a relevant symbolic tool for people around the globe today.

As an expressive art form, dance provides an embodied, physical form and language for conveying images, meaning, and feelings. in this sense, dance offers both the message and the medium. dance experiences contribute to personal, social, economic, cultural, and civic aspects of human lives. Invariably, dance serves various purposes that permeate cultures worldwide, including performing, healing, entertaining, celebrating, socializing, learning, worshiping, becoming physically fit, and communicating.

Dance has interpretive and functional powers that enrich and fulfill the human experience. Body, mind, and spirit are united in dance in ways that engage people profoundly as they seek meaning in the world around them. Dance intentionally fosters the habits of mind that enable people to question, develop a sense of agency, tolerate ambiguity, cope with uncertainty, consider alternative perspectives, and imagine new possibilities.