Unit 37 - Dance performance

Wednesday 15^th November

We started the lesson today with a warmup. This was a joint effort as I started with some stretches on the floor and then Laura continued with some stretching standing up. The warmup included quad stretches, spiral twists, side stretches, head and shoulder rolls. After the warmup we moved onto the main part of the lesson.

The main aim of today was to continue working on the pieces which we started to create last week. This week we were able to get direct feedback from our teacher as to how we could improve the piece. We started by having a quick run through of what we did last week to refresh it in our brains. Then, we performed it to Laura so that she could see what we had been working on. She gave me some really positive feedback for the choreography that I had created. However, the piece on a whole was lacking emotion. This led us on to the next task.

The next task was to start to add tension and relief to our pieces. This relates back to our memory boards that we made as this dance shows the journey through different memories. I struggle when I have to add tension to dance routines because I am very used to dancing softly due to my training in ballet and contemporary so building tension in dance routines is an ongoing target for me. We were also going to be adding breaths into our pieces as well, however for me this is a case of adding more breaths throughout because I already start my piece with a breath. We spent a good amount of time working on our own and with Laura to improve the pieces and make them more performance worthy. As well as adding tension, relief and breathing, I wanted to also add in a bit of choreography. When I was going through my piece to see where I could put some choreography in, Laura had the idea of when I go down to the floor, to go into the contemporary sequence that we learnt a few weeks ago. When I tried this, I found that it worked really well and therefore decided to add this in. After the contemporary sequence, I resumed to the 8 spot improvisation which I was doing originally. Once I was comfortable with all of this I tried running it through with the music. Here is a video of me running my piece with the music:

We then watched each other’s pieces and gave feedback to one another. The feedback which I gave Molly was that I was beginning to see massive improvements in her piece now that she has added the tension, relief and breathing. These really add dynamic to her piece. The feedback which I received was that I have created some nice improvised movement, mixed in with some choreography. Something that I need to work on is matching the dynamic of the music with the dynamic of the moves because at the moment in some places I am doing a really soft move when the dynamic is really big in the music. Another target that I was given was to make sure that I am applying tension and the breathing techniques at the same time. I can do one at a time well but struggle when putting these 2 together. Therefore, this is an ongoing target for me and I will continue to work on this.