Unit 25 - Dance improvisation

Friday 12^th May

Today we had our first dance rehearsal which we had arranged at the start of this week as I will not be able to attend any more dance lectures till after the show due to exams.

We started the session with a thorough warmup. I was chosen to lead the warmup because our dance teacher, Laura was stuck in traffic. I took the group through quite a long warmup to make sure that we were all ready to rehearse and ready for when Laura arrived.

When Laura arrived, we spent most of the session learning one of the main group dances. This group dance is to the song ‘America’ from West Side Story. Angel and I have not learnt any of this choreography but Callum, Emily and Danielle had all learnt the choreography in their dance lectures.  We spent most of the lesson learning the choreography. This dance involves a lot of improvisation as well as choreographed moves however, most of the routine is improvisation because we are reacting to what Danielle does. We have to show these reactions with our dance moves. This routine is a musical theatre/lyrical piece. Because of this, we had to improvise but react to the lyrics. I found this difficult to start with as I didn't really know what to do but as we did it more and more, i started to find it easier. I found that rehearsing and listening to the lyrics in my own time meant that i was able to improvise better as I had a better understanding of what the song was about. 

For the rest of the lesson we ran through the dance show. We started running the show in the order which the routines will come in the show. The first routines in the show I had to learn in my own time because I didn’t have time to learn these in lectures as we were busy learning other dances. I need to go over these routines as I am not 100% sure on these routines yet as I have only just learnt them. We filmed us dancing through these routines so I can watch the videos back to remember the routines. After these routines it goes into America.

I think this was a very successful session as we managed to learn most of the America routine. We only have a small bit to learn at the end of the track but we can’t really learn this until the track has been cut. We also managed to practice through most of the routines in the order of which they will come in the show. However, we did not manage to practice through my solo but we will hopefully be able to practice through this at the next rehearsal.