before christmas...

Before we even go into what happened over the Christmas holidays we need to say what happened before. We were still working on jazz and we have now completed all 3 workshops- woo! If we recap there was the first one which was lyrical jazz taught by Kelly Myriam and Alice, then there was the rock and roll jazz which was taught by Shauna, Ellie, myself, Louise and Laura-Anne, and finally there was the street jazz taught by Chloe Shannon and Katie.

We all enjoyed teaching the dances to our class mates as we all like to be bossy and in charge, and i think i can say on behalf of the class that we all enjoyed learning them, even if we don't usually dance that sort of style. I know i personally enjoyed learning the other two, mainly because i have become more confident in the more contemporary side of dancing and i do dance street myself so i enjoyed learning that. In a way learning these jazz style dances has helped us, as a group, get to know the performing arts industry because when you go to learn a dance you are expected to pick it up whether you're a dancer trained in that style or not.

Nearing the end of the term we looked back at the dances and we went over them again, off camera. Just so that we remembered them. But then we took time out from dancing and took time to organise our folders or do the jazz workbook. We also watched our performance at our school carol concert. We just performed our hairspray routine that we performed at HMS has got talent.

Although the jazz unit is not completely over, i have enjoyed learning and performing jazz and i really like the style.

jazz and a busy two weeks...

To start with we are working on our next assignment, jazz dance! Which i am very excited about as it is much similar to disco/freestyle which is the dance style i feel most comfortable in. We started with learning a dance choreographed by Miss Dolan and i am thoroughly enjoying it. Whilst half way through that we moved onto our individual choreography tasks, we had to split into groups one of which will choreograph a contemporary jazz routine, another a street jazz routine and lastly one will choreograph a Rock'n'Roll jazz routine. We will later teach these dances to the rest of the class. I am in the group that is choreographing the rock'n'roll routine. I really enjoy rock'n'roll and i am extremely pleased that i am in this group. We picked the song 'Candyman' by Christina Aquleria as this is a very upbeat and bouncy song much like rock'n'roll techniques. Although its, at the moment, not completed we are partly thorugh choreographing and only have a little bit more to do!
Secondly the other weekend i had tickets to the x-factor live shows! WOW, it was amazing, i enjoyed myself so much. All the contestants were amazing and so were the dancers. Going to the x-factor really gave me an insight to the performing arts industry, i got to see all the dancers preparing themselves, make up touch ups, the wy the cameras worked and timings for television. The layout of the studio was incredible! seeing all the dancers up on stage makes me what to be a west end dancer so much more. A dancer more than a singer because i am not comfortable with singing and need to work on my vocals a lot more! I had an amazing day and evening! i also got to meet John Wilding and Luke Lucas contestants that didnt make it to the live shows and they were so kind and lovely!

Finally, I danced at watford football club on halloween weekend! I am part of the 'Watford trust awareness dancers' every so often we perform dances we have worked on before the match and at half time. Although it is slightly embarressing when you spot people in the audience you know because you are so close to them and in character. However i wore a mask as it was halloween and nobody could tell who i was! I love dancing at watford because you get to see the audience's reaction immediately and the adrenaline rush is incredible. Although at this performance the footballers were practise shooting behind us and one ball did nearly hit my head, rather scary!
Overall i have thoroughly enjoyed the past couple of weeks and it has made me realise my love for the industry! even if i have realised i need to work on my singing!

The Past Two Weeks..

These past two weeks we have been working on our hairspray routine. We performed it last Sunday. Although we have worked incredibly hard on the routine and had to work out the dynamics and we discovered that the singers couldn't dance and sing at the same time so although they had to do the dance moves they didn't do them as energetically as the rest of the group.

When we got to the event (MSH got talent)  on Sunday the 2nd October 2011. We rehearsed and supported the other rehearsing acts, all the singers rehearsed with the head mics. They were around £2000 each, which scared some of the singers i think! Allthough we felt very professional and it was amazing experience we saw that the stage was much deeper than expected! So before we did our technical rehearsal we walked through the routine and worked out the position's.

We did our technical rehearsal and we all thought that we did well and we really enjoyed dancing it! In the evening we went back and got ready! We did all our hair and make up and got into our costumes. Here are some pictures of us!

We performed 5th, we were all incredibly pleased with the performance and the audience's reaction was amazing! We were all buzzing with adrenaline from the performance. However we soon all clicked back into reality when we got some harsh comments from some of the judges! Overall we were scored 26 out of 40, which i am sure all the girls will say, we were pretty disappointed with that as we thought we had performed really well. In my opinion i thought it was the best we had ever danced it! During the interval we all had individual audience members come up to us and say that we had been judged wrongly and that they really enjoyed the performance. Unfortunately, our day was somewhat ruined by the comments of the judges. Although i am still incredibly pleased with our performance and with all the girls.

Overall it had been a brilliant 2 weeks and performing for MSH got talent really gave the girls and i an insider to the performing arts industry. It gave us a chance to experience things that they use in the industry such as the equipment. We were exposed to some criticism and when in the performance industry you have to be able to accept that and work on the comments. Bounce back from any unreasonable comments and carry on performing, which we have been doing.

i have thoroughly enjoyed these two weeks! Its sad to think that these two years could be coming to an end soon.

Taking a break..

This week in performing arts we have been focusing on creating choreography for a competition our group will be competeing in. We are dancing and singing to the hairspray song 'you cant stop the beat', i have enjoyed this as this is really the style of dance i do best! cheesey ott dancing! I've previously done dance routines to this song so i have merged them together and created some choreography that i have taught the group. Although very tiring i love this dance! It makes me happy and bubbly which is what dancing is mean to do!

In costume design we have been focusing on bringing the work already done together and placing it on boards to create topical mood boards for this topic. We have finished some costume designs and completed all research, we have begun to present our boards and have attacked fabric swatches.

Also this week i took part in a national ISTD qulifying competition. In these competitions you compete against other girls and boys in your age and medal catagory for a place at the national finals which will take place on the 9th of october. At this competition i danced rock'n'roll with my partner because i have qualified in set dance at a previous event. When we danced rock'n'roll they played the music for a long time, and considering rock'n'roll is a very technical yet uobeat dance this made us very tired and we lost engergy. I didnt think we'd get a call back for the next round but we did! and we danced much better! round after round we got through and we even got into the final! Nand although we didnt qualifie for the nationals i am proud to say that we came 4th out of about 25 couples! it was a successful day of dancing!                                                                                                                         

This shows my partner and i when we collected our medals for 4th place.

First Week back in performing arts!

Well, although we didnt have performing arts much this week because we just got back off of the summer holidays and had a half week, we've already cracked on and done an assessment! how good are we!

Over the summer we had to memorise and learn our own individual monologues! The monologue that i was given to perform was called 'And turning, stay'. It was an argument between lovers who had broken up. I've never really been in this position before so to get a real idea of how you'd feel in a situation i spoke to my mum! she told me that if you've just broken up with someone you really love then of course you're going to feel hurt upset and sad. One other thing that she said some people feel is, insecure and vunerable. As  this was my first performance of something like this i decided that i would use the 'vunerability' idea. I knew i would be nervous, even though i wouldnt be performing to a live audience, so i decided that i'd use my nerves and turn it into the vunerable character who is feeling very insecure! I performed it, it was filmed and fingers crossed i did ok?!!!
One other thing we did this week was get our observation sheets back, one thing i forgot to do was do some research on the kit kat grils from Caberet, so expect to see that on here soon guys!

We had costume construction this week too, we tried to finalize our initial costume designs as we will be needing them soon to start making them! how exciting!
speak during the week!

Summer Holidays!

Wow, back to work already after a nice relaxing but fun filled holiday! I've done a few things that will correspond with performing arts!

One being that I danced at watford football clubs open day with their dance troop! We performed 3 times and met all the players! This gave me an insight to the performing industry because the audience were relatively close, and you have express facial expressions so that the audience don't think you're bored up there dancing! Therefore it makes you thing about the audiences view on the performance! I really enjoyed this because like rock challenge it gives you an adrenaline rush!

Linking to rock challenge I also took part in a radio interview on behalf of rock challenge for radio one on underage drinking! This gave me an insight to the performing arts industry because it made you think of how you had to speak clearly! You had to think carefully before you spoke and when you spoke it had to be clear because the audience might not understand what you say! Especially as they can't see you! This also makes it more difficult because you have to think about the tone, expression and emotion of your voice so that the audience can really get the message across because again they can't see you!

I've also been doing work on my costume design, learning monologues and creating dance routines for our musical theatre project! I haven't worked much on finishing assignment 3 but have done a little bit! I just need to add more so that I can get my grade up to a distinction!

Speak soon about my week back at performing arts!

Musical theatre and a busy two weeks...

WOW, these two weeks have been veeeeeeeeery busy.

In musical theatre we have worked on our group performance 'All that jazz' we worked on who was singing what parts of the song and the choreography for the song. I'm really starting to enjoy all that jazz and i feel as a person I'm not as bervous bout singing infront of people. We also spent a lesson on working on our 'We Will Rock You' peice, so that we can wearour we will rock you costumes we have made in costume construction. Although i may find areas of the song challenging i will definitly tackle it head on. In musical theatre we have been working on our own musical ensambles too. I am in a group with Shannon and shauna and we are singing 'Caberet' we'd previously worked out who was singing what and this week we have focused on some inventive choreography to go with the singing.We showed it to our teacher Miss Dolan enjoyed the choreography and she said that more of that style would be brilliant for the song.

In Costume construction we have had a deadline on our bodice construction. We have evaluated what we have done and how we planned to use it in later projects. I have really enjoyed costume construction in we will rock you and am very happy with my  finished product.

In the past two weeks myself and the school have taken part in two major dance events the first being our premier league debut. We were very excited but very nervous. We were worried that we werent strong enough. But we rehearsed and performed and we came 4th out of twelve. In premier league i am very pleased with that. Doing rock challenge makes my school life better and i enjoy performing on stage and with people i enjoy working with.  Another dance event i took part in was i-dance's PlatformONE. Our gifted and talented dance crew took part and we did a mini version of rock challenge.  we all really enjoyed ourselves and it was really good to see other street and contemporary crew perform. It was really good to see how other people percieve dance and how it is presented. I loved just being able to watch other dancers dance and actually enjoy themselves.

Overall its been a busy few weeks has been busy but brilliant. i am becoming more confident with musical theatre day by day....