Academics

Middle School : Performing Arts

Experience in the creative process is essential for all students. In the arts, this process involves solving problems with skill and imagination, discovering new questions, and producing new ideas, objects, or interpretations of existing works. Learning in, about, and through the arts develops each student's capacity to make meaning from experience, respond to creativity, and contribute to society.

Guidelines For the Arts Curriculum

1. The arts are essential to the education of all students
2. Students exercise and display multiple intelligences through the arts.
3. Understanding of human growth and development shapes effective arts curriculum, instruction, and assessment.
4. Comprehensive and sequential arts programs encourage students to make multicultural and interdisciplinary connections.
5. Authentic assessment in the arts is designed to demonstrate what students know and can do; it provides a model for assessing all complex learning.
6. Creating and sustaining high quality arts programs require partnerships among all faculty and between the school and community.

Ring Mountain believes that all students can discover that learning in, about, and through the arts is a demanding and creative process that can lead to a profound sense of understanding, joy, and accomplishment. We teach that in all cultures throughout history human beings have expressed insights about themselves and the world around them through dance, music, theatre, and visual arts. Our teachers understand that sequential experiences in "the practice of creating" enable learners to understand the arts and to express themselves in ways that do not depend solely on the written or spoken word. Consequently, we educate students to appreciate ideas and emotions conveyed in sound, image, movement, and words, and to speak the languages of the arts.

Dance

In every culture, dance uses movement to express and communicate myths, rituals, stories, beliefs, and information to others. Education in dance trains the student to use the body to convey meaning through the language of form, shape, rhythm, energy, space, and movement. Dance communicates in ways that are physical, visceral, affective, symbolic, and intellectual. Dance includes forms that are social and theatrical, sacred and secular, popular and esoteric, historical and contemporary.

Music

Music is a unifying force in civilizations throughout the world. Music gives order to sounds and silence, and communicates through melody, harmony, rhythm, and movement. Music education trains the student to use the human voice and a variety of instruments in individual and ensemble performances. Music includes forms such as folk, popular, band, and orchestral music, gospel music,  jazz, opera, and musical theatre.

Theatre

Theatre is an art form concerned with the representation of people in time and space, their actions and the consequences of their actions. Theatre education expands the ability to understand others and communicate through language and action, and provides a unique opportunity for integrating the arts, linking dance, music, and visual arts elements in performance and production. Theatre includes acting, improvisation, storytelling, mime, playmaking and playwriting, directing, management, design and technical theatre, and related arts such as puppetry, film, and video.