La Vi Boheme Working - Stimuli and devising (Friday 18th September)

In this lesson we carried on focusing on La Vi Boheme, so we started off by recapping what we had already set for the song. This went well but I still found it hard as we had not yet been given our characters so the show, so we couldn't really add any signature movements for our characters, but I came up with a character, for the purpose of this devising session, I just gave all of my movements a laid back and relaxed feel. But being able to recap, went well as we already knew the routine but we could now focus of putting different spins on the movements to fit either with the song or other character interactions.

For the second section of the song, we were to set and devise a duet with someone in the scene, I was with Emily and before we did this we looked at the different ways of devising with a stimulus and the steps that you would follow, first thing to do is too choose your stimulus, and ours would obviously be Rent and the song 'La vi Boheme' and from this we have already done some background research about the context and how people would have lived in this time. Then we would experiment with some movement materials and then see which ones we thought would fit the best. Once you have selected the movements that you think work best, you then refine them and refine them. This includes adding in all of your choreographic devises, this includes adding transitions and dynamics to the piece. I think that my skills came in use best at this stage as I could think of different ways of linking the moves. Once you have all of your moves and you have refined the transitions and everything, you just need to ensure that there is a clear structure and a climax to the piece.

In my devised section we had a mixture of using sections from the earlier bit of the dance, but changing around the positioning or the dynamics of it, this is done by fragmenting it to change up the order or using some repetition. To make our duet more climatic we added in some lifts that we saw in one of our original stimulus, which was the film version of this song. When we did some peer assessment with another duet, the felt that ours was a bit samey and didn't have much variation in it, which I understood as we did have a lot of repetition. So we then looked at changing some more of the movements that we had by changing the dynamics, use of the space that we had, timings ,levels and the relationships between us.

At the end of this lesson we watched back everyone's duets and from this I took on board that I don't need to focus as much on the precision of my movement and need to look at my character within the scene and help follow the message of the song by loving each other and friendship. My target for the next time we work on this song, is to add some more character motivations for each of my movements, which will be a lot easier when I have my character and can follow this through the story.

Early Choreography of 'La Vie Boheme' (Friday 11th September)

We began the lesson with discussing about what we thought a stimulus means and how we can use them in dance and movement. A stimulus is a starting point or a idea that you can develop and expand off of, to create new and broadened ideas. There are four main types of stimulus's in dance;

1. The first one is a visual stimulus, this can either be a photograph, colour's, films or anything that can be seen and take inspiration from.
2. the second type of stimulus is an Auditory stimulus, this can include a piece of music, sound, rhythm or speech. These are used as a starting point and you can either take words, phrases or patterns in the speech as inspiration and work off of that.
3. The third type of stimulus is just a theme for a piece, this can be a range of different things. Such as a fairy tale, a significant message or a personal story. This type of stimulus is often the starting point for more meaning full pieces.
4. The last type of stimulus is a piece of text. this is where you find words or dialog that inspire you and take certain words or sections to inspire and create movements. This can include; Scripts from plays, poetry, current or past news, literature or and historical recordings.

What Text based stimulus have you used before in a performance.


When I performed a duet piece in the winter dance show, we did a dance to the song 'Fix You' by Coldplay. We began by listening to the song and then discussed possible storylines and themes that we heard in the lyrics. We came up with the idea of a couple arguing and going through some tuff times. Once we had started devising it we began to look deeper into the lyrics and started to pick apart words and phrases out, one of them was "Tears stream down your face". We did some falling, downwards movements to show that the couple had let each other down. I found it easy to get inspiration from the words as you could take it direct or change the words around.


In the rest of the lesson we began to do some work on some of the rent songs, we began to look at the song 'La Vi Boheme'. We looked at the visual stimulus that were available, this was mainly the film, as they use a lots of different styles of dance, and had some really good  movements that linked well to the words of the song. We then created a mind map of the different movements styles that we picked up on in the scene and then some movements that we thought would work well in our version.


























After we had taken inspiration from the film we went on to learn the main phrase of the dance, while exploring parts of the dance and incorporating styles that we had seen in the film. I felt it quite easy to pick up this phrase as it was slow and didn't have a to fast of a beat. Before next lesson I want to explore a character for the scene and how we would interact with each other.

Lesson 2 (Rent Street Style Physical Theatre) Friday 11th September

In this lesson we developed our movement routines. We started to put what we already had to our movement sequences and then put them to the opening song of Rent, 'Rent'. I think that putting our big planned out movement routine to this song worked well as this is the first full song of the musical so it needs to have lots of energy and power to create a big impact on the audience. At first I found this hard as the song had a different pace to the one that we had rehearsed with, this meant that we either had to change our timing plan or cut out some bits. To get around this we held out poses for longer in each area, and then didn't pay attention to the beat when walking around the space.




Things that worked well in the first recording


Once we had worked out an order and spacing for the routines to the song, we recorded it and then watched it back to evaluate ourselves.

• What I thought personally went well was the whole pace to the performance. I really liked how groups didn't wait for the group before to completely finish but they overlapped it so there was no drop in the pace and the energy. I felt that this was important as it is a fast song, that creates the whole story and life of the show, and gives context of what the ruff areas of New York are like.

• The second thing that I thought worked was my groups reactions and response to the music, during our section. In our section there are a few crescendos, so we naturally held off of our movements until the music broke out, this highlighted our movements the attacking movements.

• The third thing that worked well was my groups motivations in the scene. When we were coming up with our routines we came up with a motivations for our characters for being there. We took on board this when performing as we looked at everyone in a menacing way, and we looked down at everyone.

Things that didn't work from the first recording.

• From watching back the first recording, I felt that it didn't have a enough happening at once as there was only one group on at a time, and didn't show the fast paced, busy streets in the city. I think that just by adding in more people into the scenes, of them just walking around and looking at what's going on. This would help keep the pace and make it look busy.

• What would also work is each groups stories were linked, and then we could have some more reasons to interact with each other. But once we are given our characters we would know of some relationships, and reasons for the characters to interact.

Once we had added in these improvements to our scene, I think it worked really well, and really portrayed the hustle and bustle of the streets and we also added in lots of different levels to the piece and made everything a bigger energy. At the end this tension and energy exploded with us in a pose in the center, with lots of different levels with Mark and Roger in the middle of everyone.

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Luke Scattergood's Acting CV

Luke Scattergood

Contact details

Email: Lukescattergood.ls@gmail.com

Phone: 077443485780

Adress: 99 high street, Worthing West Sussex bn11 1dj

Personal information

Height: 6'1 

Hair: brown, mid length 

Eye colour: brown

Playing Age: 16-21

Training

Starting in comedy performance certificate (2008)

Musical theatre diploma BTEC (present)

One day stage combat training

Films

Zombie land (student film in the guildbourne centre, Worthing) ( 2010)

Theatre

Blood brothers - Eddie (2013)

Teechers - Mr Nixson (2014)

Guys and dolls - nicely nicley Johnson

Dracular Spectacular - Herr Hanns

Fear and misery of the third rich - various characters

Into the woods - the Baker

Dissocia - various character

Rent - Mark Cohen 

West Side Story - krupke/glad hand