Magpie and Wayne McGregor teach pupils how to learn through dance

The toolkit, which will be used in mainstream and dance schools, aims to help pupils develop ‘personal imagination skills’ through dance.

McGregor, who founded the Random Dance company, is an internationally renowned choreographer known for collaborations across dance, film, music, visual art, technology and science.

Random dance approached Magpie last year with the challenge of helping to develop a toolkit ‘which would enable school teachers to impart a set of choreographic thinking tools, engineered by McGregor, to develop students’ personal imagination skills,’ says Magpie partner Ben Christie.

‘As part of our solution, the title of the piece Movement and Mind was literally deconstructed. We then created a set of patterns from the constituent parts, rearranged in different ways, without any scaling or skewing,’ adds Christie.

The patterns are an ‘abstract representation of the thinking tools’ and help illustrate the key principles and teachings throughout various elements of the pack.

Inside the pack are 12 ‘principles cards’ showing the basic principles and how they can be applied within lessons.

A teachers’ book and guide have been designed as well as a set of lesson cards and a card for teachers to ask questions to students at the end of a session.

In addition there are some production cards showing what McGregor is doing outside of education.