A few weeks ago whilst we were dancing amongst a cold rainy day one of our participants mentioned that he would like to dance in the rain! He explained that it’s a great way to express yourself. This led to a very in depth conversation around the idea of dancing in the rain. From this developed today’s tasks, choreography and music! Fortunately today wasn’t wet but never-the-less we continued with our theme and had so much fun, and laughter it was difficult to stop!
Today session used a beautiful mixture of the groups love for musical (Singing in the rain for today’s influence) and our creative influences. Throughout the session we were able to learn set choreography- Some movements from the Musical, and create our own movements using images and photo graphs.
We began by looking at Singing in the rain images from the live musical and used the images to recreate the body posture and image. Once we had recreated the image we began to look at how we can bring those images to life! The participants immediately took off thinking of how they would have got in and out of these moments. We had a beautiful moment where this image…..
was translated into this….
The movement attached was a movement in and out of each other with a turn in the middle as though they were spinning around their very own imaginary lamp post!
After creating our own movements in pairs we continued by teaching each other our movements to create a longer phrase of movements. This was a great way to give the group complete ownership of our dance.
I then taught the group some musical theatre steps using the umbrella in several creative ways to make patterns and move the umbrellas. This the group really enjoyed as they all liked commenting on the patterns and what each reminded them of. A particular favourite was what we named ‘The Fair Ground ride’ where we meant in the middle and walking in a circle making our umbrellas reach up high and down low at selecting points in the space.
After leaning and fitting these into our choreography we decided to re-use our photo task. This time with more abstract images…..
It was amazing to see the group thinking outside of the box and thinking of stories for each image to help them create their movements. After we created these each group taught the other groups their movements and again we added these into our choreography. Before we knew it we had 4 minutes of choreography!
We danced and danced the choreography each time making small amendments as a group. We eventually had to call it a day it was the longest we had been dancing for as a group yet!
With a smile on everyone’s faces and the song ‘singing in the rain’ firmly planted in our heads we took to the tea and coffee table for a well-deserved rest and an especially well-deserved Bakewell Slice!
