This page lists what we actually have for AQA GCSE Dance 8236. It is built from the live activities, so it is accurate on the day you read it.
Dancers who cannot name what they did
The characteristic failure in GCSE Dance is not in the studio. It is on the paper, and it looks like this: a candidate who can perform a phrase with precise dynamic contrast writes that it was "really powerful", and gets nothing for it.
The knowledge is in the body. The mark is for the word.
All ten of these activities work on that gap. Physical and technical skills, expressive and mental skills, choreographic content and devices, space and relationships, production features, aural settings: the vocabulary the paper pays for, attached to the things a dancer already does.
Two of them are the ones to set first for almost any class. Choreographic content and devices, because students use motif and development constantly without naming either. And analysing production features, because lighting, costume, staging and set are the elements most often noticed and least often described in the terms the mark scheme uses.
The set works, taken together
AQA prescribes an anthology of six professional works, and the appreciation questions tend to compare rather than interrogate: what two choreographers did with the same element, how intent shows in different production choices.
The activities follow that shape. The set works are covered across the anthology rather than one activity per work: an overview with context, then choreographic intent across the works, then production features across them, then aural settings and environments.
A department that teaches the works one at a time may find this cuts across their order. The compensation is that it rehearses the comparison the paper actually asks for, which single-work revision does not.
Critiquing your own work
One activity covers the half of the paper that is about the candidate's own choreography and performance.
It is the hardest thing in the subject to teach, because the honest self-criticism the mark scheme rewards is exactly what a nervous sixteen-year-old avoids writing about work they have just performed. The activity gives it a structure, which is the nearest a written frame can get to making it safe.
The written tasks are too short, and that matters here
Every activity ends with a written answer. In this set they ask for thirty to sixty words, averaging about forty.
In a subject assessed by extended analytical writing, that is a real limitation rather than a quibble. Forty words is a point made once. The paper wants a point developed, evidenced from a named work, and linked to intent.
Use these to build the vocabulary, and set the extended writing yourself with AQA's own questions, which are in our past paper archive, free and unaltered.
Using them
The three activities embedded further down are playable here without an account.
The lists below group by classroom use, worked out from what each activity contains. For how each is meant to be run, see ready-to-run revision activities. To put several in front of one class in order, build a sprint and share one link. Everything else, by subject and board, is on the revision pages.
The same problem in a neighbouring subject is at AQA GCSE Drama, and the physical side of performance is covered from a different direction at AQA GCSE PE.
What this page does not do
Nothing for performance or choreography, which is most of the qualification.
No extended writing at the length the paper asks for.
No video. The set works have to be watched, and watching them is your department's job.
It does not track anything, so there is no completion list to check.