Unit 25 - Dance improvisation

Wednesday 23^rd November

The main focus of today’s lesson was to carry on devising our piece of dance. 

To start off the lesson we carried out a warmup. Firstly we sat on the floor with our legs bent and the soles of our feet together. We tried to bring the feet in as far as possible. Then, we crossed the legs and carried out our breathing exercise when we curl the back and sink the pelvis into the floor. Another exercise which we carried out was when we pull one side the body back which is led by the shoulder. Unfortunately in today’s lesson I had a sore shoulder as I had a trapped nerve between my shoulder and my neck. This meant that it was hard for me to carry out this exercise as it was very painful. Also, for the rest of the lesson I was not able to carry out some of the movements due to having pain in my shoulder. 

For the rest of the lesson we were focusing on learning a short sequence that would form the next part of the piece. To learn the routine we used the mirrors so we were able to see what the movements looked like and it was also easier to copy from our teacher, Laura. Here is a link to a video of the sequence that we learnt:

The sequence includes lots of different moves such as lunges, turns and arm movements. It took us a while to memorise the sequence but once we could remember it, we practiced it without using the mirrors. Once the sequence had good fluidity and we could remember it from start to end without our teacher calling out the steps, we decided to run the full piece with the sequence at the end.

Once we had run the dance all the way through, we thought of improvements that we could make. The idea that I suggested was that we may need a bit more dynamic at the start of the new sequence as there is a change in the music because it gets louder and bolder. Something that we developed during the lesson was the timing of the piece. At first, the last part of the sequence did not fit the music very well, however with our input and some help from Laura we were able to overcome this and it now fits nicely with the music. 

To finish off the lesson, we thought about what we would like to do for the rest of the piece. As the piece is a duet, we considered about being able to incorporate some solos. There are 2 sections in the music that are very suitable for solos. The first part is straight after the sequence that we have learnt today starting at 1:12 and the other section that would be suitable for a solo starts at 2:10. Because we didn’t mind which part we got, Laura decided for us. Angel was given the first bit of music and I was given the second. From this we were then asked to listen to the piece of music that we had for our solo parts over the week and think about what moves we would like to include in these parts. We will then start choreographing this next week.