Children and Families

Taira Restar offers weekly classes, monthly groups, camps, and school assemblies for children. Contact Taira to custom design a class or camp in your community or school. Taira Restar also offers classes and workshops for families to enjoy together.

Examples:
Creative Dance Lab for Children
A weekly class for grade school boys and girls
Creative Dance Lab is an inter-modal approach to movement and dance, which combines somatic movement, solo dance, group dance & ensemble skills, theater games, play, performance, drawing, and storytelling. Noprevious dance experience needed.

Creative Dance for Young Children
A weekly class for preschool and/or kindergarten boys and girls.
An opportunity for children to dance, make music, play their stories and move their emotions. This weekly class encourages creativity, cooperation, motor skill development and artistic expression with other children. Scarves and other props extend range of motion and cultivate sensory and spatial awareness. 

Girls Night Out
A monthly group for girls
A fun, creative, safe space for girls to express themselves in a variety of ways. Girls find support within themselves, in one another, and through their creativity as they move into the challenges of adolescence. Most evenings include a check-in, artistic expression/creativity and a potluck dinner of favorite foods. Girls share the work of clean up and celebrate each girl's birthday.

Nature & Arts Camp
A 5-day camp for boys and girls 8-12 years old
Campers enjoy nature crafts, painting, collage, and photography, theater games and improvisation, movement and non-stylized dance, creative writing, journaling, and story telling, quiet time in nature and self-reflection.

These many activities will be integrated together in an inter-modal expressive arts approach.  Camp is an opportunity to explore, to experience one's self as a valuable part of a larger whole, to express increative ways, to gain self-confidence, to socialize, play, and enjoy!

KidsMove!
A school assembly
Co-facilitated with Terre Parker
A fun and creative way to build school community and to explore a relevant theme through dance, theater games and artistic expression.

FamilyARTS
A workshop for all ages
FamilyARTS is a movement/dance-based workshop designed for children and parents to enjoy together. Participants are told what to do, but not how to do it.  Everyone can join in with ease and even set their own pace.  Workshops include both lively and
quiet dance and may include drawing, singing and/or storytelling. FamilyARTS workshops are held at community centers (open to the public), at schools (open to the school community), and at private venues (for example, at a birthday celebration).

FamiliesDancing!
A workshop for all ages
Co-facilitated with Terre Parker
Taira Restar and her colleague, Terre Parker, co-facilitate
FamiliesDancing!, dance workshops for children and adults to enjoy together.   
Unlike many dance classes which are based on form and imitation, participants are told what to do, but not how to do it.  Everyone can join in with ease and even set their own pace.  Workshops include both lively and quiet dance.  Some include drawing, singing and/ or storytelling. FamiliesDancing! workshops are held at schools, museums, and
community centers. For more on Terre Parker, see Resources.

 

FEATURED WORKSHOP

FamiliesDancing!, facilitated by Taira Restar and Terre Parker is a lively dance workshop designed for adults and children to enjoy together. It was launched as a cornerstone event for Bay Area National Dance Week. Since then, Taira and Terre have offered it in a variety of venues, including San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and at the Marin County Fair.  In 2009, FamilesDancing! received a generous grant from First 5 Marin. FamiliesDancing! workshops often include toe-tapping hand-clapping music by Claudia Cuentas and can be available bilingual-- in both Spanish and English.