Thursday, 18 December 2014

Chorus Workshop

In this workshop, we explored  techniques such as shoal of fish and round-by-through. Shoal of fish is where a group travels tightly together, everyone's movements are taken into account and compensated for. The sudden change of directions as a whole group is effective because the movement appears to be slicker and has more of a pace to it. Round-by-through is also group movement, in which you move a person into any position, and then travel either, around them, over them, or under them, where you freeze until it is your turn to be moved again.

We applied the techniques above to a short fairy tale performance task. The task was to pick out any fairy tale but change it so it had a gruesome ending, specifically that everyone had to die. My group chose Cinderella. Within our much shorter and gruesome version of the story, each new line was spoken by a new person, there were four people within my group and so each person was assigned around 6 lines each. The round-by-through was good when representing travelling to the ball, or running home from it. Shoal of fish was good for creating the sense of multiple people searching for Cinderella.

Adavantages of the two techniques were that they created rather comical moments when needed, but also provided drama, casting a clear and very strong contrast in dynamics. While watching my peers perform, I spotted another important advantage to the techniques, they manage to keep the attention of the audience because the movement is both unusual and intriguing .

Disadvantages of using shoal of fish in performances is that, it is too easy to lose the tight formation needed to pull of what the movement is. I think it is a technique which needs to be rehearsed very frequently.


Example:Once upon a time, there lived a girl named Cinderella. 
( S.O.F the starting formation of a diamond )
Who lived with her two ugly step sisters.
(S.O.F)
They did not want her to attend the Prince' ball *round-by-through repeat*

Thursday, 11 December 2014

Cats Audition

The first round of the audition was an interview. Rachel proceeded to ask a lot of seemingly random/unexpected questions, for example, 'What is the Grace Brandon way to run a show?' and 'What is your biggest weakness?', questions there to test me on my knowledge on show production and  how not to bad talk yourself. I felt confident with interview, I gave off the persona that nothing said to me irked me all, I wanted the 'Interview' to be like a relaxed conversation and hope that I gave of that impression.

For my cats audition we had to sing 2 songs one upbeat song and one slow song. We had to choreograph a dance to a song from Cats. We also have a short interview about the character you want to audition for.
For my upbeat song I chose 'I'm the Greatest Star' from Funny Girl. I chose this song because its like a story to tell and the whole thing can be acted out, its a fun role to portray. I found a version of the song that was a bit shorter, other wise it would of been a bit tedious singing for so long for an audition.
Fast song.

For my slow song I chose 'There are worst things I could do' from Grease. I chose this song as it was very contrasting to my upbeat song. I really enjoy singing the song, so being able to do it for an audition makes you enjoy it more, because I am so familiar with the song I felt comfortable singing it with a backing track because I know the timing so well.
Slow song.


When choreographing my cats dance I always tried to visualize cat movement so I could improvise with a minute of movement and for a get ideas with what I spontaneously came up with, this enabled me to get into character as much and as quick as possible.My stimulus for the dance was Cats and jazz technique. I did my dance to the song 'Jellicle Ball For Jellicle Cats' its a main dance number in cats and it had a very upbeat tempo. Although I have had experience in dance, I watched the original film clips of Cats for inspiration, and took sequences of movement from it and also used phrases taught by Emily during lesson. I've never had any lessons so to ensure I had good technique, I practiced certain movements repetitively in the dance studio, watching my feet and form in the mirror and making sure they were on point. Our task was to create a 2 minute solo. I found getting a phrase down and learnt was easy but I struggled to add on to it for a while because I get stuck in a loop of practicing certain movement, I found I could create phrases but not link them very well, however because I didn't want to repeat lots of the same movement, I did persist, and, managed to come with routine that suited my ability and showed off a certain aspect of my skills. A strength I had in my dance audition was my confidence and stage presences, no matter how small the audience is you must always performance to the level required, such as smiling throughout the piece. A weakness of mine is that I tend to look down at the floor instead of out, and my posture when dancing tends to slack so that would something I would work on.

Below is the link to my dance audition:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L9yTUG2jwEA

Below is the link to a video of my group rehearsal practice for my cats audition:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f0kAo95fZ3c