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.