Friday 9th October (Rent Dance La Vie Boheme)

In this lesson we worked on the La Vie Boheme dance for Rent. We ran through the dance in character for both casts like we had worked on last lesson before assessing what we need to tweak and work on. I suggested that we try to sing along to the song because we will have to in the real show, this would help to prepare us for that. I also suggested that we start to look at our entrance, the anonymous ensemble characters are already set up in the cafe and the named characters, Mimi, Roger, Collins, Mark, Angel and Maureen, come into the cafe with some dialogue at the beginning of the song, they are then welcomed in with high energy by the people sitting at the table, this will obviously change with each cast. We ran through the dance a few times with both casts and realised that we need to improve on our dynamics. There were many suggestions to use the table and chairs to our advantage but because we don't have those yet it made more sense to go lower rather than higher. Therefore we decided to choose a line and at this point everyone will position themselves either on a chair, standing, but mostly on one knee facing out to the audiences in a punching motion to add emphasis to the line and add a slower and more focused section to the song, as the rest of the dance is very fast paced. This was successful as it works for both casts which means we don't have to change over and learn two different parts and it also made it much more direct. 

In the second part of the lesson we worked on the chair duets for Santa Fe that were choreographed last lesson, unfortunately I'm not in this part of the show as it doesn't work for my character and I was working on Out Tonight when this was devised, therefore I wasn't included. I did some peer assessing and made suggestions for the others in this part of the lesson. For example when watching I noticed that they sway theirs heads sideways which was out of time, so I made a suggestion that they all followed one person so that they are in sync with each other. I also suggested to Kat that we use some of the other class and the year twelves to fill out the space but remain still and only perform very minor stylised movements occasionally to prevent from seeming stationary and pointless on stage.