Unit 25 - Dance improvisation

Wednesday 9^th November

The aim of today’s dance lecture was to start devising our duet piece.

To start off the lesson we carried out a warmup because it is very important that we do a warmup in dance as we will be using most of the muscles in our bodies. First we carried out a breathing exercise and for this we sat on the floor with our legs crossed. We sat up straight with our hands gently rested on our knees. When we breathed out we sunk our pelvis into the floor and arched the back. When we breathed in, we straightened our back and pushed the chest out. Then we just carried out some simple leg stretches by doing some lunges. Another exercise that we carried out was to sit with our legs out in front of us and act as if a person is pulling the side of the body. As this happens, we pull the shoulder back and stretch that side of the body. 

We then moved onto the main part of the lesson. Today we were starting to devise our first dance piece. The song that we are dancing to is called ‘A gift of a friend’ by Demi Lovato and is from the Disney film Tinkerbelle. We chose this song because we are able to show the emption throughout the song and the lyrics are very fitting. Throughout devising and improvising the piece, we will take into consideration the factors that we have been looking at in previous weeks that may help us to improvise. To start devising the piece, Laura asked us to recreate the 4 spot improvisation that we did a few weeks ago. However, at one of these points we would have to be in contact. We picked our 4 points in the space and then started to think about the transitions and movements between these. Once we had come up with something, we showed each other and gave feedback on each other’s performance. As the name of this unit suggests, elements within the piece may change because it is an improvisation therefore we are able to change it if we want to. The feedback that I gave to Angel was that she had a lot of emotion but her movements needed to flow a bit more. To solve this, I taught Angel a spinning move that I thought would be really nice and fit in well with her movements. Here is a picture of me teaching Angel the move:

Angel then gave me feedback. The feedback that she gave me was that I needed to try and think of a middle section of the 4 spot improvisation because at the moment I was a bit hesitant within this section.