Rambert: 28th March 2017

The Nottingham Theatre Royal is a beautiful theatre.

I hadn't been to the Nottingham Theatre Royal before; I have watched plays in Nottingham Playhouse but never there.

FLIGHT

The first dance we sat down to watch at the Nottingham Theatre Royal was ‘Flight’, which is described on the Theatre Royal website as ‘The final work from Britain’s national dance company explores the subject of migration. Flight uses multimedia projections to create an ever-shifting backdrop as dancers dramatise the emotional journey of leaving one home to search for another.’

I enjoyed the use of projections in this dance, and was intrigued by the beginning, which started with one woman on stage. I have been lucky enough to see professional performances in the past, but these were musicals. One of the biggest fears I had about watching a live dance performance without any singing was that I would get bored.

This didn’t happen with Flight.

I loved the use of the multimedia projections, the rough texture it created allowed me to see the interactions the dancers made with the walls as painful and

One thing I also enjoyed about Flight was the relationships shown in the two duet segments. The first one, between a man and a woman, was wonderful to watch, especially the footwork. Although the movements were slow, the feet were constantly moving.

The second duet, between two females, was also intriguing. I loved the parallels used via motifs from the first duet. The lighting used also changed the dynamics of the duet. The way the two women interacted seemed violent, whereas the projection used on the walls behind made the duet seem romantic.

Hydragyrum

The second dance was called Hydragyrum. This piece was definitely the most abstract of the three dance pieces shown. It was performed under a revolving mirror, and the insidious beginning made me a sense of dread that stayed with me through the entire dance. The group of dancers, identical and anonymous, used very static movements in the beginning, which also added to the insidious feeling.

One downside of the revolving mirror was that it reflected the orchestra, most specifically the conductor. Since the mirror was such a large presence on the stage, it stopped me from being completely enhanced.

I felt as if though the dance was about public image. Not only was the mirror reflecting the dancers back down to themselves, the face all the dancers wore the same outfit and had no face meant that what the dancers saw was themselves... until the clothes came off.

I have enjoyed non-naturalistic performances in the past, and liked how the stripping of the clothing, the revelation of the dancers’ faces, turned the movements more naturalistic and free-flowing.

I liked how, when the group became individuals, the mirror had revolved around so that it wasn’t reflecting the dancers anymore. It added another layer of dread however, because the dancers took on frightened expressions.

Overall, it was a really interesting piece.

Ghost Dances

Finally, we watched Ghost Dances, which was my favourite dance piece out of the three. I think that it was due to the fact it had the clearest story line, and also included singing.

I was surprised by the storyline, and felt sympathy for the characters, whose lives were ruined by ‘death’. I loved the contrasting lighting used in the piece, bright and happy whilst celebrating life, but bleak and dull when death comes. I loved that I was able to spot the motifs that we had studied in our Dance class, and it was nice to see them performed properly.

The way the three ghost, dead men interacted was really interesting, and I liked how they seemed so in control of the living, especially since we had no idea at that point what was happening. I love how the theme of oppression was tackled in Christopher Bruce's work; it was really interesting to watch, and see the happiness of the living literally taken away by the mere presence of the three ghost dancers.

Overall, I enjoyed the story in the dance, which definitely made it more interesting for me, personally.

Stimulus: Ice

Here are the images and video from the work we did today. Great job everyone! 😼

I liked how we were all able to work to our strengths today. Some of us got to write poetry, some of us got to draw images, others got to look at the types of dynamics used in relation to what we felt when putting our hands into the shoe box.

I liked that fact we all connected the item that we touched to water in some sense. Some of us thought about a river. Others thought about ice.

I used the words that we had written on to post-it notes to create a poem about water and how it travels. The poem was in the point of view of a pebble that has been travelling along the river.

These words show the amount of ideas we had gotten from just one piece of stimuli. I think it's really interesting to see the different influences we were able to get form the activity.

The group dance worked well; it felt like we were a single unit that began to break apart slowly.

I enjoyed looking at the different relationships that can come from the idea of ice melting.

Using the poem I had written for the stimuli, we incorporated the words into the dance, using repetition to convey the meaning behind the movement.

Stimulus: Text

Stimulus

Clare gave us the task of creating a dance piece out of a piece of literature for this weeks lesson. In order to gain a variety of different types of text, Clare gave each of us a different style.

Some people had poems, some had newspaper articles, some had magazine cut outs, some had song lyrics.

oI was the one who was given the task of article.

Here’s the link to the article I chose:

http://www.smh.com.au/national/bad-to-the-bone-20110919-1khts.html

I chose this article due to the types of words used. Words like ‘emotionally hot’ or ‘literally cannot see the love in their mother’s eyes’. I wanted to do a dance that centred around the relationship between children, parents and healthcare professionals.

Who was who?

In the class, there was Dionne, Holly, Luke, Tilly and Clare. If Anthony was there, then I would have liked to have split the class into two groups. Instead, I worked with the change and had the dance be a group piece with two mother, two children and one healthcare professional.

Tilly and Clare were mother and daughter

Dionne and Luke were mother and son

Holly was the healthcare professional

In the dance, the mothers manipulated the healthcare professional. This was done by the healthcare professional's movements becoming robotic and solid as the mothers hit her on different areas of the body. I wanted to do it in this way to show the high pressure on mental health workers.

 This was done to symbolise the stress on mental health care for young people we are currently facing in this country.

 Tilly and Luke were fighting at this time, to show nature VS nurture. They used harsh movements to show the violent nature of the two of them, though the stayed on the floor throughout the dance piece.

How did it go?

I liked the end result of the performance, and if I could have more time, I would have liked to have developed a motif around the literal blindness of the children. It would have been nice to have the mothers do similar moves to the children, becoming literally blind themselves.

I think that I would have also have been interesting to have the healthcare professional saying words from the article as she observed the children, whilst the adults then repeated what she had said as they manipulated her.

Where was RADS used?

Relationships were explored through the piece. I wanted to convey a more twisted version of the parent/child relationship, and then bring something more original into the dance by looking at the strain on healthcare through parents trying to manipulate the system.  

Action was used throughout the piece, especially during the no quite play fight between the two children. It can also be seen when the mothers push the healthcare professional onto the floor.

Dynamics have been mentioned throughout the workshop write-up, but yes, they were used throughout. Most notably, when the healthcare professional was being manipulated.

Space was the most lacking, I felt. The group very much stuck to the same spot in the dance studio. This is something I will like to improve.

Creating a Peroformance: Seven Deadly Sins

The Seven Deadly Sins

When given the task of agreeing upon a theme for our Dance Festival piece, it wasn't much of a surprise that we, as a group, went for something rather dark and twisted: The Seven Deadly Sins. Naturally, there were those amongst us who wanted to do something slightly cheesy (LET'S DO THE TIME WARP AGAAAAAAAAIN!) and those of us who wanted to do something more innocent (Let's do the LazyTown dance!). However, the sinfully sinister dark approach won.

I WAS PRIDE ;)

Stimulus Items?

Clare gave each of us in the group an area of stimulus to look at. I was given literature. Naturally, I took it with great pride. After looking through the internet for a famous or two, I decided to write my own. After all, I like writing and dark, twisted themes are something I can get behind. Here it is, in its full glory:

They say seven devils own the seven seas
They’re the reason many sailors do not return
We, on our island, are isolated in greed:
The taste of power corrupts those in need.

She tells me seven devils own the seven seas

Between the swigs of mead and forks of meat she feeds me
Gluttony cannot find me whilst on land
Safe between by parapets of sand.

She simpers ‘seven devils own the seven seas’.
Beautiful lady! Stories to amuse.
She beckons me again, lust eyes wide and inviting
How do you refuse a creature of pure beauty, so enticing?

Servants whisper that I have been corrupted by the seven devils who own the seven seas
HAHA! Fools that they are! Who dares to claim their King is corrupt!
I keep them protected with my power and pride
They’re lucky that they’re allied.

Mother once told me that seven devils own the seven seas.
I slept through the day and watched the ceiling through the night
She calls me sloth, but a must disagree.

Why work when sleeping is free?

Seven devils own the seven seas?
I want to own the seven seas!
Devils don’t scare me; I want what I want NOW!
Envy is nothing, compared to me, what to see how?

Father told me as he died that seven devils own the seven seas.
It does not matter who own them; they all lead to his killer
Revenge, I am told, is never correct...
.... But how can I sit here when I can kill the only suspect?

Seven devils own the seven seas
Please please, mercy on me?
I have no place for lust or gluttony or envy or pride
What good is revenge or sloth or greed?

Please spare my mortal soul

How many sins can one man uphold?

... Yes, I know, rhyming couplets are cool. :)

What happened with the stimuli?

Along with everybody else, I took my stimuli into school with me. Now, in my head, there were seven different characters, all controlled by one of the seven deadly sins. And the final two stanzas, all the characters would be the narrator of this. But, when my poem was stuck onto a piece of HUUUUUGE paper, and the team began to bounce about ideas, other interpretations came to light.

Dionne saw the final narrator as a sailor, and the seven sins were attacking him. This was a nice concept, as it would be able to show some strong relationships between the different personalities. Unfortunately, though, there were three students who weren't able to be in the Christmas concert for different reasons.

Complications?

We were faced with many different complications whilst creating this dance piece.

Some were easy fix: Timing with the music, some people wanting to contemporary dance and others wanting to do street style dance, Et Cetera, Et Cetera.

Then, there were tougher struggles.

Firstly, two students dropped the subject. Ouch.

Secondly, I was ill for an entire week. Oops.

Thirdly, Luke wasn't able to make the Dance Festival for valid, personal reasons. Oh well.

These three issues meant that people had to change choreography, change positions, change... nearly everything. Because I was ill for a week (I'M SORRY), I also had to learn a lot of new choreography. I really struggled to learn a move, too, which I'm certain caused tension within the group.

Clare pointed out to us that the dance wasn't really, well... dance-y. How does that happen, you may be wondering? Here's how:

I, Ant, Holly, Tilly and Luke all did drama GCSE. Dionne did dance. So, most of us won't pirouette but we'll happily walk insidiously slow for two and a half minutes.

We had to include more choreography into the dance. Of course, we tried our best to follow the new routine, though a couple of us (ME) did get stressed out over the constantly changing routine. As somebody who misjudges the amount of steps she has to walk down before reaching the bottom frequently, moving isn't my strong suit.

One issue that I think the group needs to work on is, sadly, team work. I wasn't the only one who felt singled out for criticism when making the wrong move, only to then have to person who criticised you laugh when they made a mistake.

Insecurities?

I am very insecure about dancing in front of people. You might think 'what, but you dance in musicals?!'. While that is true, I do dance in musicals, there is a large difference in doing box steps and jazz hands when compared to the style of dance you see at, well, a dance show.

When it comes to musicals, even if I do bad on the dancing side, there's always the singing and acting sides to make up for it. Sadly, these safety nets aren't there when performing a dance piece.

I think what I was most scared of was going wrong in the live performance. It didn't help that the Dance Festival was on a Thursday, when the Thursday Curse was bound to strike.

Dynamics in Movement

Looking at Dionne's group's dynamics in both tasks:

The dynamics used in Donne’s group’s work, in order to suit the music Requiem For A Dream, were robotic and jagged. The movements are intense and purposeful, and created a dark sense of foreboding. I thoroughly enjoyed the powerful, intense movements of the upper body. Furthermore, I enjoyed the fluidity of the slow motion sequence.

I liked the fact that, after we were told to use juxtaposing movements to our piece, Dionne’s group turned their movements into more gentle, caring movements that felt timid and shy. It was also interesting to see how the slow motion sequence was made softer, more passive.

How did you feel about the tasks?

All in all, I felt like the task to juxtaposing movements to music was difficult, but quite fun. One major issue that I had was timing; we made our movements faster, more harsh than our original movements to Blue Sun. Because of this, I was unsure with the new timing and how long to hold movements for.

Do you like dynamics?

I do! Dynamics, I feel, correlate well into drama. Movements are used to create an emotion, and you could juxtapose motions to music or setting in drama, too.

Rudolf Laban and Labanotation

Who is Rudolf Laban?

I won't spend long on talking about Laban's past.

Laban was a Hungarian dancer, director a theorist. He was born into a rich family that governed provinces within the Austro-Hungarian empire. So, he had a pretty happy childhood. He originally moved to Paris in order to study architecture, but then gained an interest in the relationship between human movement and space. It wasn't until Laban was thirty that he began to study, in Munich, the art of movement, known as Ausdruckstanz (no, I have absolutely no clue on how to pronounce that). He had connections to the Nazi Party, but that's not really too important at the moment. All in all? He's been pretty successful. Good for him.   

Why should I learn about him?

Mentioned above, Laban was interested in the link between movement and space. He wrote several books on this topic, such as A Life For Dance, The Mastery of Movement and Laban's Principals in Dance and Movement Notation. So, yes, he wrote a lot. However, as the title suggests, in my dance class, we are focusing on Labanotation.

What's Labanotation?

Besides being a fantastic word to use in Hang Man, Labanotation is a systematic way of noting down movements. You see, Laban felt that there wasn't an efficient enough way to note down dance moves. So, as all great minds do, he created his own method. Unlike using stick figures and words, he used a series of shapes and shades, as shown in the above picture, lovingly displayed by Laban himself. 

Laban used his notation for the following:

• To show the direction and level of the movement
• Which part of the body was actually doing the movement
• How long the movement occurred for
• The Dynamic quality of the movement

Hold the phone, if you're anything like me, you're currently wondering 'hmmm, what in the world is the dynamic quality of the movement. The stone cold truth is, it's the way the movement is done. Fast, gracefully, slow, frantically. So how would I write the dynamic quality of the movement?

• The way the movement is performed.

Much more simple, wouldn't you say?

Why is Labanotation worth learning?

If I drew a stick figure spinning, it'd A), look horrendous and B), not give you all the information that's needed.

You see, I could give the same horrible stick figure drawing to five people in my class. Dionne, for example, may want to do the twirl gracefully, taking her time. Luke may want to do it quickly. Summer might want to do it with one hand in the air. Anthony might do it whilst moving across the dance studio.

But I, the original creator of the horrendous stick figure drawing might want it to be done in a sinister way. There are so many different interpretations of that one drawing that, unless I were to write out exactly what I wanted in as much detail as possible, the movement could be completely different to what I actually want. Since writing it out in so much detail is a waste of time (and my handwriting is awful), I would want to use a method that tells the dancers exactly what I want. And which method does that?

LABANOTATION!

Sorry, I got excited. But yes, Labanotation tells the dancer what to do with their entire body. Let me show you with exciting graphs.

So, it's a bit like Dance Dance Revolution...

... With levels.

What on Earth did you just show me?

I know. It's so strange to look at. But trust me, it does begin to make sense. I'm not qualified to teach this whole new language, but this lady here is. CLICK HERE FOR LABAN LESSONS!

So, do you actually understand Labanotation?

I understand what Labanotation is for. I don't actually know, however, how to follow and learn from Labanotation. I'd like to, though. It's pretty interesting stuff and, who knows, maybe one day all dance lessons will be taught with abstract shapes and shadings.


So, what are your thoughts so far?

I'm looking forward to finding out how to piece together all of the Labanotation theories. I can understands the basics, if the amount of times I've spoken about abstract shapes indicates anything. Although the initial concept looks horrid, I have been assured by C that in reality, it isn't actually all that bad. Whether she's lying or not, we'll just have to wait and find.

I'd also go and give his wiki page a quick read if you're interested in Nazi Propaganda. His personal life was pretty interesting, despite being possibly the most scientific dance practitioner I've ever heard of.

My kind of dance practitioner is Matthew Bourne, but you can't knock it until you try it.

Bye!

Unit 22: Movement in Performance

What is Unit 22?

Unit 22 of the BTEC LEVEL 3 National Extended Certificate in Performing Arts course is, as the title suggests, all about movement in performance. Now, as somebody who began studying dance as a subject around seven weeks ago, the idea of dance is a bit skewered; I cannot leap into the arms of a bare chested man with the grace of a swan; I cannot backflip of the beat of Kanye West's new song.

In short, the thought of just dancing in front of an audience is quite petrifying. However, as the Delivery Guidance suggests; learning the different styles of movement is relevant for both dancers and actors. So perhaps the course won't be as bad as I fear.

Unit 22 has four learning aims; A, B, C and D. Creative titles, I know. Nevertheless, I shall provide for you darling readers a short summary of each below.

Aim A: Theoretical and practical ways to think of movement. So, we could attempt to look at Laban notations, or work as a group to come up with as many movements to express a certain relationship or feeling. We will also focus on understanding RADS, which I'll go into more depth about later.

Aim B: Creating a performance out of stimulus items, such as poetry or art. As a poet myself, it would be interesting to potentially see one of my poems reinvented into a dance routine. It may be a tad controversial, however.

Aim C: The actual performance. Here at Sutton Community Academy, we are given various opportunities to perform. We have a Christmas Show, a Dance Festival, an annual Musical, a Summer Show. In short, we get to perform a lot. I've been acting and singing in these shows since I was 11. The only time I've danced has been for the school musical, yet it's safe to say that my singing has been a far superior skill. So, just dancing for an audience? A bit of a scary concept. Let's hope the butterflies don't start.

Aim D: Evaluating my work. The Delivery Guidance I have been given by my teacher, C, outlines the IMPORTANCE of self-critism and constant reflection.

The current reflection of my dance skills: God, should he exist, is currently weeping.

What I hope my dance skills will be like by May 2017: Billy Elliot, step aside. There's a new dancer on the block.

What's Important?

For Unit 22, I think that the most important element of this piece will be RADS. What on earth is a RADS, I hear you yell? RADS stands for Relationships, Action, Dynamics, Space. Simply marvellous, I know.

Relationships:

I like relationships; it's similar to drama in the sense that we often use proxemics to show relationships. Proxemics is the distance and height between people or maybe a person and a prop. Relationships hold a very similar place in my head to relationships in drama. So I'm pretty confident about this.

Actions:

I like actions, too. Walking gets me places, lifting up a sandwich to my mouth fills my hunger and hugging my loved ones gives me that warm fuzzy feeling that only a loved one can give you. And perhaps, at the end of this course, Jumping, turning, boxsteps and a leap can give me a feeling of freedom.

Dynamics:

How fast am I going? How long do I hold this for? Am I showing the right amount on energy? I'm expecting dynamics to confuse me. I'm also expecting myself to just get on with it. There isn't much else to say on dynamics; it's just speed and the way the move is performed.

Space:

Let's hope I don't end up knocking somebody's tooth out. Space. Space is good. It keeps you safe, allows you to feel comfortable, shows the audience how the dance is going to work. For example, if I stood in a straight line with my group to perform, it'd look a bit boring. However, if we changed the spacing between us, to a zig zag pattern... now, that's what I call excitement! Space in dance: not quite the final frontier, but pretty close to it.

Thoughts so far?

I think that Unit 22 will be fun, despite my lack of dancing skills. My class is full of supportive students and two understanding teachers who I know will not push me past my limits, and make sure that I am comfortable with everything. I hope that by the end of this course, I am able to look back and realise how much I've improved; not just with my dancing skills, but with my confidence, too

Bye!