Matilda- Friday 3rd February 2017

Today's lesson was our dance class. In today's lesson we wanted to focus on finishing the choreography. We also wanted to make sure that everything else we had done was sharp and we all knew were we should be.

Before we started that we had to warm up. We began warming up with our normal routine which we do. This routine ensures that we have warmed up every muscle and stretched everything out. In the routine we do side stretches, lunges, small head rolls, working through our feet (through demi pointe to full pointe), small jumps and a few more. The small jumps are to get the adrenaline and blood pumping through out body to make sure we are all warm enough. If we did not warm up then one of us could hurt ourselves and pull a muscle. 
After we had warmed up, we went through the number a couple of times to see where we was up to and to see what bits we needed to work on. We always rehearse in front of the mirrors. We feel as though this really helps us because it means we can see what we are doing and if our spacing and positioning is correct. Before we moved on to finishing off the choreography we wanted to polish the first section. We made sure that the section where we run into a arrow shape was clean and our spacing was correct. I was opposite Darcy in the arrow and i always ran to far forward which then would make the arrow shape look off so i had to work on getting to the right space and being opposite Darcy. We then started to finish off the choreography. We had most of the letters finished we just had a couple more to do. We all wanted to make sure that we didn't copy any movements that we had done before as we wanted them all to be different so the audience wouldn't get bored of watching the same thing. We managed to get up to the letter "X". Before running the piece from the beginning we wanted to run through that section so we all knew where we had to be at what time. Firstly, we did it slowly without the music from the beginning of the letter section. After we had done this, we sped it up to normal speed just without the music. We all seemed confident with it so we tried it with the music. The first time we did it with the music we messed up a couple of letters but we all knew where we had to change. Then we did it again and we did it all correct which made us all feel confident and we wanted to try the whole number. We ran through the whole song and we did get it all correct. We knew that we just needed to keep going over and over it so it got stuck in our head.

My target for this lesson was to work more on the singing side of the song but unfortunately i didn't get to do that. I still feel as though i have progressed in this lesson though because we have nearly finished the song and the singing was okay but still needed some work. My target for next lesson is to definitely work on the timing of some of the lyrics and to make sure we are all still building up our chracterisation.