Unit 26 - Choreographing dance

Saturday 10^th March

Today I was teaching a contemporary dance class for the first time. I have had experience within primary schools of teaching children dance but have never taught my own dance class before. Teaching this class will enable me to build in confidence and choreograph my own routines which I will then teach to the class.

Before I took the class, I designed a lesson plan which I was going to follow when teaching the lesson. The lesson plan is as follows:

Register – waiting for people to arrive.

Talking to the class:

·     getting to know the names of everyone in the class

·     talking through what we will be doing in the lesson today

Warmup:

·     pulse raiser

·     standing up stretches

·     sitting down stretches

Technique (travelling from the corner):

·     turns

·     leaps

·     chasse and preparations

Start to teach the choreography

Cool down

The night before I was teaching this lesson, I choreographed a routine for the class. When I was choreographing the routine, I kept in mind the age of the children that were going to be taking the class. I found the choreographing process quite difficult because I wasn’t sure of the ability of the children and I have never choreographed by myself. However, I was able to draw on my past experiences as I have taught children this age before so had some ideas for choreography. I managed to choreograph about 30 seconds of dance which I thought would be enough.

Overall, the class went really well. All of the children in the class already knew each other from other dance lessons so this did make them quite chatty. This therefore did give me a bit of a challenge when teaching as I had to make sure that they were listening to me and making sure I kept them under control.

Next week I will be teaching the class again. I will work in the week to choreograph some more material to teach to the class next week but there may be some new people in the class so we will probably go over what I have taught the class today.

Unit 26 - Choreographing dance

Thursday 8^th March

Today I had a dance session with Emily and Luke to work on some choreography for the dance show.

The song that Luke and I will be dancing to is already partly choreographed. This is because the dance will involve Eve, Toby, Anna and Aidan for the first section. I have already created the choreography for Eve and Toby and have been into their school to teach them it. We will be going back into the primary school soon to go over the choreography.

I have sat down with my dance teacher Laura and we have written down the timings for this song. The routine is to the song ‘A thousand years’ and will be the very first routine in the show. The timings are as follows:

·     0:00-0:52 – Anna and Aidan

·     0:54-1:22 – Eve

·     1:23-2:00 – Eve and Toby

·     2:01-2:45 – Charlotte

·     2:50-3:47 – Charlotte and Luke

·     3:50-4:40 – Charlotte

In these sessions on a Thursday evening, we will be focusing on the part where Luke and I will be dancing together.

Following on from last week where we tried some lifts, we tried some choreography today. We start by doing the same moves. We start with 2 balances and then move into a waltz turning step. Then Luke goes down onto his knee and I penche lifting my back leg up. When Luke stands up, I twist in so we’re next to each other and then I twist out and we end holding hands with our other arm up in the air.

In the next few weeks, we will carry on working on this choreography.

Unit 64 - Singing techniques in performance

Thursday 8^th March

In the morning session that I had, we worked through the songs that I will be singing for the singing performance to make sure that they are all ready.

We carried out a full compressive singing warmup this morning with the addition of a new exercise. This exercise involves using your head voice and singing a major scale on ‘ah’ to reach the very high notes. This is because we will need to hit very high notes during the song ‘The Sweet Escape’. By carrying out this exercise we can fully ensure that our voices will be nice and warm.

After the warmup, we then ran through all of the songs of which I will be a part of. I don’t think that any of my songs need developing any further in terms of vocals at this stage and that it is now just a case of making sure that I keep rehearsing and applying all of the comments that I have been given by my lecturer.

To start off the afternoon session, we carried out a full warmup including the next exercise from this morning. We then moved on to rehearsals for the singing performance.

We set some chairs up in a semi-circle so that we could get a feel for how the performance is going to shape. In front of the 4 chairs was a microphone stand which will have a microphone on it when it comes to the show. We then ran through the programme of songs in the order of which they are going to be performed. However, there was quite a lot of stopping and starting because we needed to work on some of the songs. We were also working on the transitions between the songs because this needs to be scripted so that everyone knows what they are saying to introduce the next person.

One of the songs that we needed to work on was ‘We’re going to Ibiza’. During the session on Tuesday which the first years had, they added a harmony into this song and I therefore I needed to learn this harmony. Molly is singing the tune, Kellyann is singing the lower note and I will be singing the higher note. Robert will also be singing the lower note with Kellyann but an octave lower. The group then showed me the harmony and Cara sang my part so I could listen to what notes I needed to sing. We then tried singing this all together and after a while of practicing, it really started to come together. Here is a video of us rehearsing this harmony:

Another song which needed a bit of work was ‘The lion sleeps tonight’. We have worked out a harmony for this song and have been practicing it but it still needs some work because some people keep losing their note during the harmony as other people in the group are putting them off. After some work on this harmony, we managed to get it sounding more like an ensemble. Here is a video of us practicing the harmony:

The song ‘Wouldn’t it be nice’ still also needs some work. This song will be sung by Robert as a solo. He has only just recently changed his song and he is still not sure on the lyrics for the song. He needs to work in his own time to listen to the song and learn the lyrics in time for the performance.

Overall, I think the performance is coming together really nicely. I now just need to work on putting together a script which will state the transitions from one song to the next. We have also sorted out what we will be wearing for the performance. I will be in a blue dress which ties into my song ‘Mr Blue Sky’ especially. Kellyann will be wearing a summery dress, Molly will be wearing an airhostess costume and Robert will be wearing a Hawaiian shirt. All of these costumes fit in with the theme and will good for the performance.