Choreography Evaluation

 

Evaluation of Working Process:

We were introduced to our creative project on 17th September, 2015. We Had six weeks to choreograph a solo, duet or a group which had to be longer than two minutes.

We were asked to use an instrumental or spoken word to choreograph our routine. It was the choreographer's choice whether they themselves wanted to be in the piece or not and I chose not to be in my piece.  The piece of music that I chose was 'Beat of Passion' from an Indian movie 'Taal'. I liked this instrumental as I thought it had a lot of emotion in it and I wanted to show those different emotions through my choreography.

Along with this music, I wanted to showcase a little bit of my culture to the audience and therefore, I decided to use an old folk myth of Goddess Durga and the demon Mahishasur. From childhood, everyone just teaches us one thing which is that no matter what the truth always prevails which suggests that the good will always win against the bad. This myth is an example of that.

 

The first week of this choreography process, I wanted my dancers to understand the story and the learning behind this story. Thus, I spent some time with them individually explaining the characters that they were playing in the piece and what it meant to play those characters. I spoke to them about how I want them to present themselves in this act and what their emotions would be. 

From the second week onwards, I began choreographing my piece and I decided to create a short motif for my dancers to develop according to their characters and they were given this task for a week after which, they would have to present their developed movement. I spent the next two weeks on completing my choreography to the piece as well as guiding my dancers through this process.

After the fourth week, my main aim was to work on structuring my piece and polish it. I taught choreography to my dancers in sections and therefore, it became important for me to spend some time and structure the piece the way I wanted it to look like. We had our feedback week that session and so, my piece had to look presentable. Everyone appreciated my work and the main feedback that I got from Lucy was to keep the choreography authentic and to use the 'crawling' movement further in my dance. Following the feedback session, I decided to add another section in my choreography where the tiger and goddess walk in the 'crawling' movement in in the battle against the demon.

This was the final week, performance week and so, I focused on polishing my work and making sure that my dancers know what they are doing on stage when they perform this piece. We also recorded the piece, so the dancers could rehearse when at home. Personally, I thought my dancers worked very hard through this process as they had to learn a completely new style in such a short space of time.

 

Strengths/Challenges:

One of the main strengths in this process, I thought was the dedication that my dancers brought to this piece. Their dedication, motivated me and made me want to try new lifts and movements with them as they were so co-operative and hard-working. I was highly impressed and surprised with myself as well. I do not enjoying dictating people and therefore, I do not enjoy choreographing other people. However, this process has taught me a lot of things that possibly would have never been able to understand without going through this. I understood myself better as a person as well as a dancer. This helped me understand the intricate process of choreography and how to present things in a beautiful way. These learnings will always remain with me and even the mistakes that I made during this process was a learning for me as I now know how to avoid such problems or how to solve them.

 

The fact that I chose dancers who were not trained in Indian classical style of dance was challenging because we spent most of our time focusing on getting the hand gestures correct and also that they had to learn a new style dance in less than four weeks was challenging for them. Another problem we faced was timing. Since we all the same project we all wanted to work with our dancers/choreographers and make the choreography look good and therefore, we all found it difficult to balance our times with each groups that we were working with.

 

Areas of Improvement:

My main focus for the next project would be to choose the dancers, concept and song wisely and to not get so ambitious as it can backfire. I thought that as the dance style was so new to my dancers, it complicated things for them and therefore, they were not confident enough to perform this piece. Also my target for next project would be to use a dance style that we all are aware of or rather trained in a little bit and then incorporate a little bit my style into that; instead of using a new style and incorporating contemporary movements within.

For the next project, I would also like to work with my dancers more and in order to do so we may have to fix rehearsals which may take place during our lunch time or after college hours as it affects the choreography when the dancers are not sure of what they are doing.