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*