Thursday 8th October (Rent Out Tonight Early Scaffolding Choreography)

To begin this lesson we discussed how things were going and areas that we felt comfortable or not so comfortable in, personally I am feeling very confident with La Vie Boheme, Light My Candle and I feel I know the narrative of the play very well. I wrote that I wanted to work on my off-cast characterisation and Out Tonight mostly. Therefore Charley and I were to start choreographing Out Tonight while the rest of the class devised a dance with chair duets for Santa Fe.
Charley and I started by setting up five chairs in a line facing away from ourselves to act as a scaffolding pole that we will have to dance with. We sang through the song with a backing track to warm up our voices before singing it through again while improvising some movements that we had thought about previously to see how they would work. We found this to be quite difficult at first, because we didn't really know what we were doing and both felt quite awkward without having any direction. Therefore we tried again but facing each other so that we could use a competitive feeling to provoke emotion and aggressiveness. After this we had some ideas for what we wanted to do so we discussed our movements and made them clearer with an order in our heads. This was quite challenging as although we play the same character we have our own different interpretations and our routines, characterisation and interactions with other characters will be different. I suggested that we start in the corner and turn around dramatically at the beginning of the song to set a feeling of authority and draw more attention to ourselves. This entices the audience and will contrast with the previous song 'Will I' as it is a very slow and meaningful group piece. Going from this to a powerful, high energy solo will be memorable and show that Mimi is troubled and this song and her job doesn't fit her personality. The way I am portraying Mimi I only want to have this type of sex appeal in an aggressive way only in this song, to suggest that she is stuck in the job and the rest of her have matured.
To finish the lesson we performed the first verse and chorus to the rest of the class to practise performing the song and become more comfortable with what we ad devised. The reaction we got was great, I felt very confident and being in character for this specific song made me learn a lot about my character and how I want her to be portrayed.
Rent - Out Tonight Early Choreography - First Verse And Chorus