Grease
This week we went on with the choreography of We Go Together. I'm not at all a professional dancer; in fact, the only professional course I did was a compulsory "Drama and Dancing" class in grammar school, and the only time I had to perform a professionally choreographed dance (which was actually a very simple waltz) was my prom dance about ten years ago. It's a tradition in Hungarian grammar schools that final year students perform a short dance with their class at their prom.
Anyway, I'm not saying that I hate doing it, because I kind of enjoy it sometimes, but I tend to be quite clumsy when it comes to dancing. So I think the dancing part of our exam performance, however small it is, will be a great challenge for me. I'm sure I'll need to ask one of my classmates to practice the choreography with me a couple of times, because I tried doing it at home on my own and I kind of messed up the whole thing.
The Rocky Horror Picture Show
The dance choreography of The Time Warp, however, seems to be a lot easier, maybe because I feel that there's a lot more acting involved. Because I haven't done so yet, I spent some time reading a little bit about the play and the film. I'm pretty sure I hadn't heard the title before the course, but the story is quite familiar.
The story is about a young couple being stuck in the middle of nowhere when their car breaks down. There's a castle nearby, so they go there to ask for help. However, the place is owned by a crazy transvestite, Frank N. Furter and some other really weird people. Unfortunately I didn't have time to watch the whole film, but I checked some videos on Youtube and I found the mood of it really dark and abstract, but, at the same time, very funny.
Knowing that the film was made in the '70s and includes such topics as LGBT+ and sexuality, I think it must have been quite a shock at that time. It got indeed a lot of negative feedback.
Blood Brothers
We started this session with an exercise, during which we had to read the lines of our character three times.
- Just read out the lines loud.
- Read out the lines loud while walking around in the classroom. Stop and change direction every time you come to a punctuation mark.
- Read out lines loud while walking around in the classroom. Stop, do a pose and then change direction every time you come to a punctuation mark.
The teacher also asked us to think about why we had to do this exercise. I found several different possible reasons why it can be useful. My guesses were:
- space awareness
- body awareness
- practicing speaking and doing certain movements at the same time
- intonation and punctuation of the text
After this, we had to try reading out our lines without relying on our script. For me it was not too difficult because I've been off book for a while, but the tricky thing was that I had to read only my own lines in the right order without hearing my partner's lines in between them. In case of dialogues, I normally learn my lines kind of connected to my partner's previous line, because my line is a sort of reaction to their line according to the script. Besides, it can happen on stage that they don't say exactly what's written in the script but something really close to it, and if I answer by saying my next line word by word, it wouldn't make sense to the audience, so I think it's really important to hear my partner's lines as well and not to focus on my own lines only.
The last task, which we had to do at home, was to read over the script once again and underline the most important words in it. This, I think, helps us with knowing the feelings and thoughts of our characters, and it's also useful for the intonation of the lines.
My partner and I finally had a chance to work on our scene with the teacher, which was very helpful for me. At this point, both of us are already off book, so instead of focusing on the spoken words onla, we've started to include more actions and movements while saying our lines, and because of this, the scene is kind of beginning to "come alive". After that at home I read my notes from a couple of weeks before when I listed the parts of the scene I wasn't happy with, and I think I managed to improve most of those parts during the session.
Frozen
I've been living with kids for a few years now, so I've already memorized the lyrics of my solo song Let It Go years ago, and I watched the movie several times. However, I've never taken time to look for background information about the story and the characters, so I did this now. The movie is still very popular, so it was super easy to find information and interesting facts about it. Since my song is sung by Elsa, I mainly focused on her, but I also found some other things about the story in general.
The story is based on the Danish fairy tale The Snow Queen written by Andersen, but it is very different from the original tale. The characters are completely different, as well as the storyline itself, though if you know the original story, you will definitely be able to find the connections.
Despite the fact that Andersen was Danish, the set of Frozen is mostly based on Norway. Disney also hired linguists of Scandinavian languages to work with the scriptwriters to put as many Norse words and phrases in it as possible. If I had more time, I would check the lyrics of Le It Go looking for words like that, because I used to learn a little bit of Old Norse back in the university, but I think I'll have to leave that for later.
Anyway, back to the song. Going through a couple of site, I learnt that Elsa was originally meant to be a villain, just like the Snow Queen in Andersen's fairy tale. She was originally planned to have a lot darker appearance. Here's some early sketches:
However, after the songwriters created Let It Go, they saw the song and the lyrics so positive and hopeful that the storyline and the script was eventually changed.
My teacher told me that she wants to hear my performance of Let It Go soon, and I hope there will be enough time for that in the next couple of weeks. I've been practicing the song for a while at home, so I hope the singing won't be a problem. As for the visuals, watching the scene from the movie again, I've already tried to come up with some choreography, but I'm not sure it will work well on stage.
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