A Collaborated Rehearsal Process
In my Group Forms class this semester, our final project was to create a group piece collaborating in a choreographic process with 3 other students in our class. The four of us were then to find four more dancers and choreograph an octet. This project stemmed from what started as two separate duets, which then turned into a quartet, which then we were asked to create our piece into an octet. This was a unique process to go through. I knew the struggle of sharing the roll as choreographer from a previous assignment earlier in the semester where there were 8 choreographic voices. From that assignment, I knew that this final assignment was going to challenge me and my choreographic mind.
From the first stages of this assignment when it was just in the duet stages, I had the daunting notions of the future octet that would stem from the ideas we had during the creation of the duet. My duet partner, Baylie, and I had a myriad of ideas for our duet. These ideas stuck with us as we headed to our quartet with our other two classmates.
Unfortunately, I was not able to participate in the quartet part of the assignment due to being at Nationals for the Club Dance Team during part of the creation for the quartet and I was not able to be a part of the finished product of the quartet. I helped with inputting my ideas into the quartet that was now going to be a trio. From the start of this piece, we started compiling the ideas and movement materials from our two separate duets and seeing how we could reuse and reinvent our movement and ideas to become a cohesive unit. We started with reimagining the beginning gesture phrase of mine and Baylie's duet. We thought about facings and speed a movement and how we could alter the phrase. And then we started to integrate material from Alyssa and Mikaela's duet. Watching the trio from the outside was very interesting. From talking with my group and from listening and watching them rehearse, they had been struggling with transitions within the piece.
Once we got to working on the octet, we again discussed figuring out better transitions than the ones used in the trio. During our first rehearsal with our four other dancers, the transitions were our struggle areas. We had the basis of our material, which was our initial goal for our first rehearsal, but nevertheless, the transitions still proved to be our biggest struggle areas. We made sure to use our rehearsal time with our other dancers wisely by teaching them the bulk of the material and spending outside time discussing or working out transition phrase material.
We took footage from our first rehearsal progress and showed it during our group forms class and got feedback from our classmates and from our professor, Sofie Clemmensen. The feedback that we received mentioned our transitions, which in the video most of the transitions were featured as just simply walking, and they also commented on our spacing choices. Near the end of the piece, we have set ourselves up into a circle formation and we ripple various gestures from our beginning phrase. We slowly speed up the ripple until each of us is almost twitching into the gesture rapidly and constantly. This serves as impetus for our ending. Our classmates suggested that perhaps we should alter the amount of distance that the circle covers.
During our second and final rehearsal, the four of us choreographers spent time discussing what to do for each transition that we had been having trouble working out in previous rehearsals. We decided on recycling phrase material we had used previously. This decision actually was very successful for our piece and helped it flow cohesively together. With the transition material, we found that our circle phrase towards the end was naturally much smaller. By the end of our second rehearsal, the piece was complete and our cast of dancers felt confident in our material.
After our final showing of our piece, we received feedback again from our classmates and from our professor. One comment we received from our professor was that the transitions were seamless and much improved from our previous video showing of the piece after our first rehearsal. Our classmates also mentioned that our repeat of the beginning at the end was very satisfying and that they could see something happening afterwards if we ever chose to extend the piece. Our alteration to the end circle was also mentioned and we were told that it read much better as a tighter knit circle the way that we had altered it to be. All in all, our final showing was a success and we were quite happy with our finished product and with the focus of our four other dancers who were kind of enough to be apart of our piece.
I was very pleased with the video of our piece. We worked hard to gather all of our differing ideas together into a cohesive work. This process was different from any choreographic process I have ever been a part of. It challenged me, it caused me to think about my choices, and it also challenged me to speak up when I had an idea or didn't feel like someone else's idea was working well in the piece. It was a challenging semester, but I feel accomplished watching the video of this final group forms study.