Field Trip to the Music Center in Los Angeles

Today was Field Trip day at school. It went fairly smoothly.

Last year I made the decision to skip the field trip because I had too many unruly kids. This year I have 90% of the same kids as last year, but the most difficult ones have gone their separate ways and have been replaced with very sweet kids.

We were invited to take part in the Children's Festival in downtown LA. We were given a DVD to use to practice this dance called Rocka My Soul. Today we took the bus downtown and navigated our way through crowds of hundreds of kids from other schools. It was very well organized. There were many volunteers who helped us and one very nice man gave us a tour of 2 of the 4 theaters on the Music Center property.

We got to go inside the lobby of the Walt Disney Concert Hall, we sat inside the Ahmanson Theater, and then the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion is where the performance we were to see was going to take place.

The performance was by Ailey II, a west coast offshoot of the Alvin Ailey dance company. The performance was fantastic--just long enough so that the kids didn't get bored. Just cultural enough to expose them to something new, and just jazzy enough to really keep their attention. Thanks to YouTube, I was able to find some videos of what we saw today:

This is part of a dance called "Revelations" that was actually choreographed by Alvin Ailey himself in 1960:


The whole performance had the kids mesmerized and I'm so glad that they had the chance to experience something like this.

When the performance was done, the kids went outside and had a change to get in circles and perform the dance that they had learned, which was done to the same song as the closing number in today's dance concert.

Afterwards, the teachers made the command decision to get as all back to school and then eat lunch, even though it was around 1pm. We were worried about not getting back on time. But we did, and broke out the lunches with minutes to spare before the 1:50 bell.

The weather was good, the traffic was kind, and the kids did great. You never know how things are going to turn out on field trip days. But today was smooth, just the way I like them. Yay!