Unit 37 - Dance performance

Wednesday 6^th 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.