Wednesday 6th
September
Today
was the first dance lesson of the academic year. Today we mostly spent the
session discussing about how the last academic went in terms of dance and how
we think we can improve on that this year.
We
started off the lesson by talking about ideas that we have for the rest of the academic
year for this unit – dance performance. After reflecting on what material we
created last year and how well the show went, we came up with some ideas to
make the show this year bigger and better. We came up with the idea of
advertising the performance a bit more to ensure that we receive a larger
audience. We discussed the idea of filming bits of material before the show and
possibly making a trailer for advertisement purposes. This would then enable us
to look at a style of dance which none of us in the group have done before –
dance in film. We then went on to discuss other techniques that we want to
focus on during the year. Styles such as contemporary, tap and ballet where a
few of the styles that we mentioned.
We
then went on to discuss what this unit will include such as the live
performance at the end of the year and the assessments throughout the year to
make sure that we are maintaining our progress throughout the year.
After
having a long discussion, we moved on to doing some practical work. We started
by carrying out a warmup to make sure that we weren’t going to injure
ourselves. The warmup included several floor stretches such as sitting with our
legs out in front of us whilst reaching forwards, sitting with one leg out to
the side and drawing the knee up and a cat stretch. Standing up stretches
included lunges, head rolls and shoulder rolls.
We
then moved on to the main practical activity which was the 4-spot improvisation
game. I have done this exercise before last year as part of my dance
improvisation unit. Therefore, I was able to explain to the others in the group
what the activity included. The game starts by finding a spot on the floor
anywhere within the room. At this point a motif is created such as a lunge or
any position that can be moved from. A second point on the floor is then found
and a second motif is created at this point. This is then repeated for spots 3
and 4. Once the 4 spots and the motifs are clear, music can be played and the 4
spots are travelled to with the music. The aim of this activity is move fluidly
form each of the points and not necessarily do the same transition for each
time from one spot to the other because it does aim to include improvisation. I
found this activity quite easy as I have carried it out several times before.
Also, because I studied the dance improvisation unit last year, this helped me
to gain confidence when improvising as I had not done any dance improvisation
before.
