Bhangra- Week 3!

Monday 28th FebruaryIn Mondays lesson we learnt a dance that would develop the western feel into our bhangra. It was not a bhnagra dance it was more contemporary but the dance we learnt had a very touching story behind it so it gave us a chance to really act our stories so that we would be able to do it for our bhangra stories. Throughout the lesson we learnt the dance in sections and made sure we knew the dance perfectly so that we could just dance it and be able to add the emotion in naturally. In the dance we learnt the story was domestic violence, because we chose this many of the moves were hand isolations and movements because in such cases where there was/is rape or domestic violence the victims tend to remeber the hands of people because they do not want to see the evil faces of the attcker. By the end of the lesson we had all enjoyed learning the dance and were very moved by each others performances. As some action points for the next lesson we thought it would be better to get back into the bollywood feel. As a class, after the lesson we felt we had achieved a fantastic outcome. We just needed to learn to use western dance and add feeling and emotion into our bhangra choreography.

Tuesday 1st March
Tuesday was our double lesson and our aim was to interpret bollywood themes from stimuli. We had to create in our groups a bhangra story, but being aware of certain elements we had to choose one of the following stories:

• Love
• Passion
• Forbidden Love
• Chase
• Family
• Disapproval

We chose forbidden love. Our story was that we would have a girl as a christian and a boy as hindu and they would fall in love. But as soon as their families found out they were forbidden to be together. The christian family would interpret a more contemporary style into their bhangra and the hindu family would be more traditional but include elements of street. We disscussed some crutial things we thought should be in our performance, we said that there should be lots of reaching and ,as every bhangra fil/story has, a comedy element. Our comedy element would be the proposal. And although it is forbidden love there has to be a happy ending as this is one of a few bhangra/bollywood rules. I was in a group with Katie, Laura, Ellie, Chloe and Kelly. We felt that in our next lesson we should develop our story further and pt it into a dance. Our rehearsal outcome was that we had brainstormed a stroy to do with forbidden love.

Wednesday 2nd March
On Wednesday we had to develop our motifs through choreography. We, as a group, decided that we should start as families, come together as a group and dance, go into a line and do some effects, katie and kelly break off. We only managed to choreograph 7 counts of eigth but atleast everyone knows what they're doing at the begining of our performance. This was where we got to put the simple moves we learnt on the 25th January into practise. In the next lesson we decided we needed to work on finishing our story and make sure that it is clear to our audience.

Thursday 3rd March
On Thursday we again had to develop our motifs. We choreographed our fight scene. This is where the families find out that the couple are in love and they are dancing together/fighting/arguing. We made sure that we mixed the contemporary and street dancers. The notes from this lesson would be to polish thee scene and to add more feeling and story to it. Over the weekend we were told to look at different bhangra music we could use in our performance. An outcome of the rehearsal would be that we created new choreography for our peice.

Friday 4th March
Friday was a great lesson. We watched a current bhnagra movie from India. Although we could not understand it, it gave us a great concept of the story and made us really think about how we can get our story across through dance. It also gave us some brilliant idea's of unique moves we could include in our performance!

I really really enjoyed this week and am really enjoying bhangra!