Night Dancer

In a word--buy this book. It is wonderful--in word and art. The word music, rhythms, and spellbinding imagery are a delight. Thank you Marcia and Lisa!

I found Marcia Vaughan?s Night Dancer to be a wonderful, evocative book to use in my creative drama classes with primary aged children. It's a great piece for integrating the arts?music, dance, and drama?into the classroom. The children in the class for six and seven year olds are currently preparing to enact this story in a showcase for parents. The characters of Kokopelli, and the different desert animals like coyote, javelina, and snake, are vivid and easy for the students to act out, equally appealing to boys and girls, and a great way for them to explore different qualities of movement related to those animals. The lyrical language features words that describe a wide variety of movements that we?ve explored?growing and stretching, stepping and stamping, sliding and gliding, snapping and clapping. The children have created their own choreography as they weave about following the leader and chanting the repeating verse sung by Kokopelli. We?ve listened to Native American flute music and we may use it to underscore the procession of animals dancing behind Kokopelli. The children love the mysterious and three-dimensional illustrations that pull together desert landscapes from different parts of the Southwest to create an ancient mythical desert setting. And the poetic use of language by the author is helping them discover the concept of personification by acting out how moonlight can ?sweep away darkness? and how music can ?rush through arroyos? or ?whisper past pueblos.? The fact that the story starts in silence, then builds to a joyful climax, then disappears again into silence is a helpful one for this energetic group that needs to learn how silence and stillness can be powerful in a performance. I give this story high marks for anyone who works with children?s literature as a basis for drama and dance.