cats Review and research

 A few weeks before we were told about the audition we went in pairs and rehearsed to perform our interpretation of a dance piece called rush. For the research for Rush I looked at what choreography is and it all starts with a stimulus which can be auditory , textual or visual. To start my solo audition I used images as my stimulus because getting going was something I found very difficult. In lesson we were taught some jazz techniques some of which I kept and included in my solo after playing around with the speed from which we were taught to make sure my audition was unique just in case someone in the class used the same dance move as me in their choreography. During rehearsals I struggled a bit to focus and get on with my work because there were other students in the room and some seemed to have made a lot more progress than I had therefore that put me down a bit however I used most of that time doing research into street jazz which I thought was my strong point. For some time I had a solid 1 minute street jazz piece which I was proud of because I was playing to my strengths and not trying out new things. The images below are the ones that caught my attention during research.

Even though I had a minute worth of choreography I was a bit unhappy with my finished product because I didn't input enough of the research into my choreography. I remembered that you can have different types of stimulus therefore I decided to try out using the music from cats as my stimulus. After the improvisation I found myself creating still images that I had found in my research about cats. I then included some dynamics to link the still images that i created for example in the rush piece I used cartwheels to get from point at to b therefore i decided to build up on that because the rush workshops were the foundation of developing choreography.


REVIEW

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xr7Uxllaxwc

I think that the performance went well because I found myself struggling to come up with a start to the piece when we first started. In my choreography I explored a lot of choreographic devices to try and improve and extend the quality and quantity of my audition. To begin with I put together the movements I liked from the jazz lessons we had because the performance had to be jazz related. I then linked this project to my previous dance projects and went through the process of playing around with choreographic devices like reputation and fragmentation. I also played around with the pace at which I was performing and though of different levels because cats are always moving around and creating different freeze frames. This allowed me to have a minute and a half worth of material , I then decided to develop my piece focusing on street jazz because street dance is on my strengths in contrast to the cats dance style. adding in some street moves allowed me to have a full audition which I was happy about at first then I thought that I hadn't challenged myself enough therefore I started watching some clips from the musical. I enjoyed what I saw therefore I started to try out a few for example I practised the leaps which I showed to my friends. They liked what I was putting on display and one of them suggested that I do some floor work to contrast the leaps. I then played around with some floor work , some of it I was taught by the teacher in lesson and some of it I found in some videos related to the play. At this point my new piece was starting to come together therefore I decide to stay behind and use the dance studio after college. Listening to the music over and over again I started to improvise and ended up with some moves that we see in the final piece like the cartwheels which allowed me to travel from A to B which including concern for the space I had to perform. Trying out the new moves was paying off and I decided to include some street moves from the previous choreography because I didn't want to put all that effort to waste plus the street moves added to making my performance unique to the rest because we were all taught the same things in class and were likely to have similar final performances which is something I wanted to avoid.

wagwan

in todays lesson we discussed political issues that affect our lives and how we hear about them. the tree i picked were addiction , teenage pregnancy and increase in transport fees because they have affected my daily life. after the discussion we got to choose a character out of a policeman, celebrity , MP and baraster then create another character that has an opposing point of view to get us to write a persuasive piece.  i chose the celebrity and decided to adda reporter who was going to oppose the celebrity.