Just dance!
Babies don’t perform movement – they discover it. ―Margaret Fuhrer
👥 Serves: 2-10 people
🎚 Difficulty: Easy
⏳ Total time: 11-30 minutes
🥣 Ingredients: A safe, open space without obstacles or sharp corners, music playlist, optional: notebook, recorder, or drawing materials
🤓 Wholebeing Domains: Awareness, Liberatory Learning, Ritualising
💪 Wholebeing Skills: Body positivity, Embodiment, Fun, Letting go, Mind-body-connection, Movement, Non-judgement, Play
Just dance!
📝 Description
Rekindling your dancing spirit.
Toddlers and young children dance without being self-conscious. They are spontaneous, fully present, and unconcerned with being watched or judged.
Through this simple movement-based experience, you are invited to reconnect with a way of moving led by your body, where curiosity replaces performance, and where play becomes a form of discovery. It takes you back to a time when movement was primarily about play, expression, and discovery.
This exercise helps you recover essential skills such as:
- Listening to the body and non-visual senses.
- Reconnecting with rhythm as vibration.
- Exploring space without goals, expectations, or outcomes.
- Deepening the emotional connection with children and rediscovering the joy of sharing experience as equals, without paternalising them.
This exercise is especially recommended during holiday time and it works best when practised with children under 6 years old. This recipe has been kindly donated by Alice Siracusano of Nati Per Cambiare.
🌟 Steps
Step 1 – Setting the space (5’)
Choose a movement of the day when you won’t be interrupted for 10–15 minutes. Define a space where movement feels safe and free. Remove obstacles and make sure the area invites exploration. Then, select a couple of songs and let your child/ren select one too. Trust their instinct: their choice is part of the exercise.
Step 2 – Free dancing (10’)
Press play and start moving. There are no steps, no rules, no choreography. Let the child/ren – and your inner child – lead. Move like an animal. Move close to the ground. Move big or small. Stop and start again. Follow impulses rather than ideas.
If you notice you start stepping into “performance mode” – How do I look? Am I really doing this? Are the steps right? – pause for a moment, look into the child/ren’s eyes and reconnect with the joy of dancing purely for the sake of it.
Step 3 – Repeat (once a week for three weeks)
epeat this experience once a week for at least three weeks. Each time the experience will be different. Each time something different will surface.
Step 4 – Reflect (after each week or at the end of the three weeks)
Take a bit of time to reflect:
- In what ways has your perception of your body shifted?
- What changed in the way you move?
- In what ways has your relationship with the child/ren changed?
You can write in your journal, or record a voice message, or draw. Decide together with the child/ren how to document the experience.