choreography contribution

Mr Mistoffelees

This is one of two songs that my character is mainly involved in therefore contributing to the choreography was essential. For this song I was paired with Niamh, this being one of the long songs in the musical we decided to plan a half each. The second half which I was assigned was mainly showing what Mr Mistoffelees was capable of in contrast to the first half which was all about introducing him to the rest of the cats. In the original cats production we see him perform magical tricks which did not go with our context therefore I wanted her to the majority of the second half performing her solo. My original plan was to have the rest of the group perform some choreography I had planned to reflect through dance that Mr Mistoffelees could performing things that the other cats could not. On the day we had to pitch our idea to the rest of the class Niamh did not turn up which meant I had to cover the whole song. To start with I had no idea what I could do with the beginning of the song but the rest of the group helped me pull through the choreography. The teacher asked questions of how I was going to reflect our context in the song which got me thinking and helped get the choreography on its feet. In the original we see the first half of the song describe and introduce this cat therefore I decided to go along with that idea ,adding our context to it as a group we decided that Mr Mistoffelees was a new designer. When you are going into a new competitive environment you need to show that you are there to stay therefore first impressions needed to be good from Mr Mistoffelees. From this we decided to have her make a big entrance from the audience with two other characters alongside her to reflect her status. Tugger helps present this new designer and shows off her work therefore I decided that models should walk down the cat walk wearing something designed by this cat for example it could be accessories such as hats or jewellery and scarfs. The models then stroke a pose at the end of the catwalk which enforced that Mr Mistoffelees was a great designer because some of the top models were wearing her designs. The next stage was to take down the huge instrumental that covered the majority of the song. I then separated the group in fours and gave them 32 beats to create a small choreography that they were to perform to the rest of the class. We started brain storming ideas in our little group and we started to drift towards the dance style used in the original cats production which was something I wanted to avoid. I then asked people in my group to just improvise to the section we had and everyone came up different pieces which we then put together and ended up with a piece of choreography that was different from the rest of the groups. I then I asked everyone to show what they had devised and ran through what we had a few times. therefore was still a section of the instrumental left which I then decided to allow Mr Mistoffelees to perform her solo since this was her song instead of cutting out that remainder. Left was some repeated chorus verses which I then decided to have the group divided in the categories of models/designer/agents. I was to sing the first verse then the designers had a verse and during the verse they were doing the final touches to their models with Mr Mistoffelees helping them. the next verse was for the models who walked down the catwalk with the agents watching them. After that it was the agents  singing while the models were on the catwalk and some agents talking to designers about the models. The last two verses we sang together and gathered around Mr Mistoffelees who  then made her exit while the rest of the group sang the last verse.