For this task we were put in two groups and my group had to choreograph a dance for the witch's rap and the bean stalk song. In the end we ended up with a solid two minute dance piece for the rap and a minutes worth for the bean stalk. I think that the performance went well overall because we pulled together as a group. We managed to remember the whole piece when we performed which is a good achievement because rehearsals just before the performance some of the people in the group had their timing wrong and were forgetting some movements. I think this is because there was half term just before the performance week so people started to forget the piece, in the future we would spend some time outside college time to perfect our performance. The video also shows that some of the movements were not sharp or performed like they should have been which is also a result of not spending enough time rehearsing. To improve on this in the future maybe we can sit down as a group and review our performances from the previous rehearsals and set targets to what we want to achieve by the end of that rehearsal. On the other side we managed to come up with three minutes worth of material , process from which we learnt and taught each other street moves and some fun along the way. We managed to choreograph a piece straight from the research we found on the street dancing which is difficult because sometimes you just want to do what you know to make things easier. As a group we also managed to include a lot of choreographic devices and learnt how applying them can help you develop a choreographic piece because at one point we hade seconds worth which turned to minutes after applying the relevant techniques. Below if a link to our performance and below that is the process which got us to the final performance include the research I made.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WEqmTSrX4h4
Watching the videos back I think that the rap had more choreographic devices and a bit more in depth than the bean stalk because we had more time to work on it. Lucky for us my groups majority were interested in street dance which made things easier because we were choreographing for a rap. The interest in street dance from the group allowed us to try out a few street moves that we may have been not able to do if the group did not have interest on the subject. We watched a few YouTube clips of different hip hop performances and tried out a few from which we got some of the actions in our final piece came from. below are the examples we looked at.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=azjEnC6W3KM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d3y17D_K9Zw
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hVoNwiFIPRU
I enjoy watching dance performances and street dance competitions. Over the years I have picked up some moves from watching the ones that are top of the game perform , for example I like watching dance tutorials by diversity and the jabberwockies. During rehearsals I taught the group a few moves which included the nae nae and the dougie. These are popular dance moves that went trending in the past few years and they are what people associate street dance with. This is enforced by their traces in performances of a lot of big street dance crews in arenas and competitions. During the process some of the members of the group were struggling with executing the moves so we went on YouTube and found some step by step guides on how to perform some street moves.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xB6uQ9aZpms
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4EIl1qh9lqU
We also looked at the basics of street performance to enable us to push our piece to the next level.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FriaMvobUi0
After we gathered the research we then put together all the dance moves however the piece was too short because the song went on for three minutes and we only had about 45 seconds worth of solid material. As a group we then started to manipulate what we had and decided to add some choreographic devices to our piece. We listed all the choreographic devices we knew and had used in the previous project of rush. Repetition was the first thing that sprang to mind to me and I suggested that we repeat some of the movements to have a longer piece. Another group member said that we needed to find different ways to link the movements and we added some walking changing directions which lead us to the marching seen in our final performance. Now we had about a minute of material and the piece was starting to come together. Things were going well however performing to the music that we were choreographing for things didn't work out because the music was much slower than we thought therefore we fragmented our piece and played around with speed of movements slowing down some things which added more time to our piece. After playing round with pace we decided to explore levels because we were all doing the same thing at the same time and it just looked like it lacked creativity. Cannon was added to give the piece a better dynamic look which also contributed to more time and a step closer to the three minutes. We went back and tried it to the music and things were much better . The last thing we considered was staging because the use of space has a huge significance to choreography. This lead to us considering the performer of the song because it wasn't going to be a track on the background therefore we had to make sure we adapted our piece to the performer. This pushed us to consider changing the structure of our dance and us changing shapes to allow the performer to have centre stage which we see in the final clip because the dancers form a V shape to accommodate the performer. Ideas on how to improve the piece were floating all over the place and after considering all the ideas we had two and a half minutes. We decided to use the script to influence the last thirty seconds because the rap included names and descriptions of the message that the character of the witch was trying to portray through the song. Near the end of the rap the script mentions that the witch turns people into 'rocks ,dog or a chair' therefore we decided to make freeze frames of the mentioned things because it contributed well to how we exit in the end. With the freeze frames we finally choreographed material for the whole song.
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