Unit 59 - Music in the community

Music project application

Project overview

The project will involve music workshops, which will be led over a 6 week period to blind and partially sighted children and young people. The workshops/project will be in collaboration with LOOK UK which is a charity that supports visually impaired young people and their families. The project aims to build many transferable skills for the young people and also provide an enjoyable experience.

Benefits of the music workshop project

There are many different benefits to a music workshop and project such as building confidence, communication and listening skills. These skills are transferable which means that the young people will be able to use them in other situations. For example, the workshops may build the confidence of the young people which will enable them to speak out if they are having problems in school, college, etc. For some of the young people, there may be a chance to lead part of a workshop which could help improve their confidence massively but for others it may just be a case of actively participating in all of the exercises in the workshop.  The workshop also will benefit the young people as it will provide them with an enjoyable experience which they can look forward to when they finish school. It is evident that music workshops have been a great benefit to people in the past as they have provided many opportunities to people of all abilities which include boosting skills and creating performances. This is also what this music project aims to do. 

About Reaction Music

Reaction Music is a community interest company (CIC) which was set up by Kevin Bowman. They offer music workshops to people of all ages and abilities across Herefordshire and Worcestershire. Their clients include the NHS, mental health patients, youth groups and care homes. These music workshops can provide therapy to the patients and act as a social prescriber to help to improve the conditions of the participants. 

How can the workshop work with LOOK?

Music workshops are a proven way of helping people to build confidence and can bring together people who are from different areas of the community. It is very common that visually impaired children are isolated within a mainstream school and can suffer from a lack of confidence and poor social skills. Through the music workshop project, the children will be able meet people who are in a similar situation to themselves and share experiences. This can then lead the young people to forming friendships with their peers in the group.  The group will also be able to develop their confidence throughout the workshops, working on tasks over the course of the 6 sessions designed to develop problem solving, team working and social interaction. 

Project plan

Workshops will run for six weeks starting from July 9^th. All workshops will start at 4:30pm and will finish at 5:15pm (each workshop lasts 45 minutes). Schedule is as follows:

Monday 9^thJuly

Monday 16^thJuly

Monday 23^rdJuly

Monday 30^thJuly

Monday 6^thAugust

Monday 13^thJuly

All workshops will be held in the Performance Studio at The Chapel Arts Centre, The Royal National College for the Blind, Venns Lane, Hereford, HR1 1DT. The room is quite large and is a perfect place for the workshops to be held.

The overall budget for the project is £1000 which will be separated and spent on different things.

£100 x6 – for each workshop to cover venue hire, transport, etc.

£20 x6 – admin costs for each workshop

£280 – equipment and other resources if required

Unit 59 - Music in the community

Overview of the music project

Upon starting this unit, I didn’t have much knowledge about community music and didn’t know much about what sort of things happen in s music workshop. This is because I have never really been involved in music making before apart from a few occasional lessons in primary school and the completing the singing unit as part of this course. 

At the start of this unit, I carried out some research into what music in the community is, its benefits and some community music organisations in the local area. I learnt a lot from this research and presented my findings in a PowerPoint presentation. 

During some of my performing arts sessions, I was able to think of and practice some potential exercises for the music workshop. I was then able to lead my peers through a series of exercises as a pilot workshop. The feedback that I received from the pilot workshop was to stay calm and relaxed when leading the session. This is because if I seem relaxed, it will make it easier for the participants to relax too. This is something that I will keep in mind when I am leading the workshop. 

Alongside these sessions, I worked with Kev, who works for Reaction Music, to gather a better understanding of what goes on in a music workshop and what we were going to be doing in the workshop. He was also able to give me direct feedback on what works and what doesn’t work within workshops. I was able to have a session with Kev where we sat down and went through all of the activities that we wanted to put in the workshop. We worked on a piece to teach the group for the second half of the session. I found these sessions really helpful and they made me feel more confident about leasing the workshop alongside Kev.

On May 14^th we facilated the workshop for young people with a visual impairment in partnership with the charity LOOK UK. Before the workshop began, I was quite nervous because this is something that is way out of my comfort zone but once the workshop started to get going, I became more relaxed and the nerves started to ease. I remembered that this was one of the feedback points that I was given after the pilot workshop. I noticed that as the workshop went on, the group started to become more relaxed and got more involved with the workshop. 

We would like to develop this workshop into a full project and would take many aspects into account when doing so. One of the main things that we would take into consideration is the feedback that we got from the participants. According to the evaluation forms, some participants felt the same at the end of the workshop as they did at the beginning. When designing the project, this is something that we need to take into consideration and think about when designing the activities. Having said that, none of the participants decreased in mood from the beginning to the end of the workshop which means that the workshop must have met its aims of being fun and making sure that everyone gets involved. 
I believe that the aims of the workshop were met during the session. The aims were to develop many different skills such as communication and listening skills. However, to develop these skills even further, I think that the group would certainly benefit from taking part in a full music workshop over a 6 week period. I saw a difference in how the participants were from the start of the workshop compared to the end and I think that carrying out workshops over a 6 week time period would have a massive positive impact on the lives of the young people. 
In conclusion, this project has enabled the young people to begin to build their confidence, communication and listening skills. It has also given them a chance to meet new people who they may have never met before. By expanding the project, it will allow for a continuation of all of these things to occur and will make a long lasting positive impact on their lives because they will be able to apply these skills to many situations such as school or college where they may be going through a tough time. The skills that they have learnt from the workshop will enable them to speak up and make changes if they require it. 

Unit 26 - Choreographing dance

Saturday 5th May
Junior contemporary performance at Hereford River Carnival:

Unit 59 - Music in the community

Presentation notes for expanding the project

·     Delivered a music workshop on 14^thMay which included ice breakers and the main activity of learning a song

·     Aims to improve many skills within the young people – confidence, listening, communication, etc

·     Project will last 6 weeks with a workshop every week – each session will be different

·     Many things to consider when planning the workshops such as:

-     The length of the workshop

-     Additional information about the clients

-     Advertising the workshop

-     Capping the numbers

-     The age range

·     Budget of £1000 - £720 on workshops and admin fees and the rest on equipment

·     Applying for funding through several organisations such as Children In Need, The National Lottery and Arts Council England

Unit 59 - Music in the community

Here are some of the feedback forms from the music workshop:

Unit 26 - Choreographing dance

Different types of choreographic methodology

When choreographing for the dance performance, we used a range of different choreographic techniques. Each of these techniques have both strengths and weaknesses. 

The first choreographing methodology that I used this year was choreographing a dance to a song and then keeping the same choreography but changing the song. I did this at the start of the year when I choreographed a routine to the song ‘Like I can’ by Sam Smith and then when it came to choreographing ‘A thousand years’, we just changed the song and kept the choreography the same. This is a good method of choreographing because if you really like the material that you have choreographed but the song doesn’t fit your theme anymore, you can just change the song. On the other hand, the choreography may not fit the timing of the new song and you may have to change the timing of the new routine which may confuse your students. 

Another good way of choreographing is to carry out some research into the style that you are choreographing for. Dance styles are always changing and it is good to keep up to date on the latest performance of these styles of dance. Watching videos of people performing these styles is a great way to pick up new ideas for choreography. It is always good to watch what everyone else is doing but don’t copy everything because this could cause it to become boring. I carried out this method quite a lot when I was choreographing the hiplet routine because I had never done this style of dance before and so I took some of the moves from the routines which I had seen online. 

Splitting the routine up into different sections is another way to choreograph a routine. Most songs have a pattern in them which means that the same part of the song is sung more than once or the same tune occurs more than once. To make it easier to choreograph, you can split it into sections, then sections can be repeated several times throughout the routine. It also makes it easier to choreograph a section at a time rather than choreographing to a random point. Just be sure not to repeat the same choreography too much because the audience could get bored. 

Another choreographic methodology is mapping out a journey. For Aurora in Faeriland, we marked out where we wanted the piece to travel to when we were choreographing it. The idea is to do this with chalk if possible but you can always do it in your head if you don’t have anything to mark the floor with. Making a journey on the floor will allow the piece to tell more of a story and will focus on movement before the choreography. However, this method of choreography is not always applicable and probably wouldn’t be applicable if you were choreographing a tap routine for example. 

Lastly, improvisation is another style of choreography. This is a great method to use if you are unsure of what moves to do for the routine. The best way to do improvisation is to improvise with the music on but also film what you are doing so that if you create a nice sequence of moves whilst you are improvising, you will be able to look back on what you did and not have to try and think back to what you did. On the other hand, some people may struggle to improvise if they haven’t had a lot of dance training and therefore this type of choreography may not be for everyone. 

Unit 26 - Choreographing dance

Friday 18^th May

Today was the day of the dance performance, ‘Maleficent’. Here is a link to a video of the full performance:

https://vimeo.com/272117833

As you can see from the video, there were lots of different styles of dance performed throughout the show.

The show started with the song ‘A thousand years’ which was a contemporary dance piece. This routine involved 6 dancers – Anna, Aidan, Eve, Toby, Luke and I. The reason why we picked this dance to be contemporary is because the song is quite slow and not many other dance styles would have fitted with this type of music. We could have used ballet but I think that I was the only one in the cast who has had ballet training and it would be extremely difficult to teach the whole of the cast ballet as well as the routine in time for the show. This would require a lot more time which is not something we had. Although the routine was contemporary, it did have some ballet elements in it such as the pas de chat in mine and Luke’s duet. Contemporary is such a great style of dance because it has a really big range and covers a lot of different moves and also combines other dance styles. I choreographed most of this routine myself and then went into the primary school to teach Eve, Toby, Anna and Aidan their parts. 

The next routine in the show was ‘Happy’. We said from the beginning that we wanted to put some tap into the show somewhere but we weren’t quite sure where. When we were deciding what the storyline was going to be and what the message behind each song was going to be, we thought that using tap to show how happy Maleficent was, was perfect. During rehearsals, I really struggled to make this routine look happy because I was so focused on making sure that I remembered all of the steps and didn’t miss any beats. However during the show, I managed to stay looking happy all the way through the routine. The reason why we thought tap would be good for this song is because it has a really good rhythm to it which made it quite easy to choreograph to. 

Molly’s solo was the next dance in the show. This dance was more of a movement piece than a specific dance style. This is because it was more of a piece to act out part of the story rather than a specific dance style. I helped Molly to choreograph this piece. I found it quite hard to do this because Molly is completely blind which meant that I had to explain every movement to her instead of her just copying me although it did allow me to improve my teaching techniques and become more aware of the movements that I was doing. 

The next dance in the show was ‘Beautiful trauma’ and this was the first dance that we choreographed for the show. This dance was contemporary but was mixed slightly with a bit of street/modern. The reason why we chose this style of dance is because this part of the story is quite fierce and needed some anger so we got this by mixing the 2 styles together. It also went with the style of the music because part of it was slow but then other parts of the song sped up.

Aurora in Faeriland came next. This was another movement piece which showed Aurora playing in the woods. This was quite similar to Molly’s movement piece in regards to telling a part of the story. The aim of the piece was to show the audience how playful Aurora was. The movement piece carried on into ‘The curse won’t reverse’, also a movement piece where Aurora pricks her finger.

The next song ‘Rise’ was in the style of hiplet. Hiplet is a fusion of ballet and hip hop. It took us quite a bit of time to choreograph this routine because there was so much to consider. The moves for this type of dance have to be contrasting but at the same time, they have to work together. I did a lot of research into this style of dance to make sure that I had got the hang of the style before we started to choreograph anything. This dance style was completely new to me at the start of this year and I didn’t think that I would be able to choreograph in the style when I first saw it but I did. 

The last song in the show was ‘This is me’ and was a street/jazz routine. Most of the routine was street based although, there were a few jazz elements to the routine such as a leap and the moved at the very beginning of the song. The reason why we chose for this routine to be street/jazz is because some of the moves in the routine had been taken from the film ‘The Greatest Showman’ which the song is from. The song is very upbeat and well suited to the street/jazz style. However, when the song slows down, this is where the jazz elements come in. 

As you can see, I have used lots of different dance styles throughout the performance ranging from contemporary/ballet to street/jazz. I think that all of the routines and their styles contributed perfectly to helping us tell the story of Maleficent. Also, using these different styles of dance helped me to show my different emotions throughout the whole show. For example, to show anger, using hiplet was perfect because the choreography involves a lot of sharp and edgy movements. This is in contrast to when we used contemporary/ballet at the very start of the show because the emotion here was happiness and playfulness which we were able to reflect in the choreography. If we were to keep the style of choreography the same the whole way through the show, it would be extremely difficult to show the emotions that the characters were feeling - especially Maleficent because she goes through a lot of different emotions throughout the story. 
The variation of styles would help to draw the audience in. It is very important to keep the audience drawn in to the whole performance and by showing them a variety of styles, this enabled them to see a variation. 
Using all of these different styles in the show has enabled me to revisit some dance styled which I haven't done for a while but also discover new style of dance. Before this unit I had never heard of hiplet but now I have performed this style of dance in the show. Learning and choreographing in this style of dance has enabled me to develop my skills as a dancer and add to the list of styles that I know.