Dance - Choreographing and directing dancers workshop

On the first day of the dance workshops rachel started by going through a brief history of dance videos through time some of the artist she showed us included;

Busby       :

Gene kelly:

Mary wigman:

Maya deren:

She showed us 5 other videos  and asked us to say if we liked them or not and why, the 5 videos were

Lxd: Matched 

I Enjoyed this video, it was a nice modern take on the classic nutcracker song. The production design and costumes were very nice. The editing worked well with the dance and all together was pleasing to watch.

Fiest : 1234 

I thought this viedo was ok how ever it felt very flashmob like and nowadays flashmob are very over done which has become boring how ever when the video was realised in 2007 it probably would have been more interesting and new. I like that it was done in a  one shot though as i thought it worked well with this type of dance

Tamara Levinson: Showreel 

I liked this video i thought it was simple but well done so you could really focus on the dance.

Rosas : rosas dants rosas 

I again really likes this, the repetitiveness and sycrinisation. The different shot types and fast cuts made it interesting to watch.

Ellie goulding : Guns and horses 

This was rubbish.

What is the point int he dancer, why is ellie dressed like that but the rest arent , why are they in a woods , what has this got to do with the song, why the horse 

Just, Why ! 

Watching these videos made us think about how all aspects of the film, such as costume, location can affect dance and that you should just plonk a dance into the video just because you think it will look nice or it will end up confusing and pointless like ellie gouldings video.


After that we  went through some  ways we could come up with an idea for a dance video, the two main ones were, talk to the band/ musicians and see what the main elements of the song is and work around that  or  come up with a basic ideas which you can improvise with the daners to come up with a solid idea.


We then created a small routine using basic phrases such as jump turn gesture travel pause, and manipulating each other through distance.

On the second day, we developed these routines to come up with a better idea  me, kat, Lauren, josh, julia went with the idea of a person trying to fit into a group of people. Initially with a circle of people moving in sync with each other  whilst another person out of sync trys to get into the circle involving the idea of resistance we had done the day before .

We felt this didnt really work as planned as, it looked more like the circle was trying to exclude the person  rather than the person not fit in. It also was very simple and not interesting to watch.

We then decided to create a basic set of actions for everyone to do then one person dose them more flamboyantly or differently.

On the third day we went through this routine with the dancers. It was interesting to work with the dances rather than our classmates as they reacted to the tasks we set in a different way and added some interesting points and techniques.