Dancer and Choreographer Obvious

http://vimeo.com/31376800

Title Dancer and Choreographer Obvious

Resources  Poster with words Dancer and Choreographer written, 20 sheets of blank white paper, 4 magic markers to write with, and assistant to help with the writing. Video camera and tri pod. 

Description The performer holds the piece of paper up to the audience and asks if anyone can read the words and tell what they mean.  Then the performer begins to dance, improvising, and making up movement and talks to the audience about what it means to be a dancer.  Then the performer begins to repeat a movement saying "I like this movement, can you name it for me?" and asks the audience to label the movement and the assistant then writes what the audience says on a piece of paper.  The performer does this again, dancing, choosing a particular movement to repeat and have the audience name the movement with the assistant writing it down.  This happens four times total.  The assistant uses a black pen to write with.

Now the performer takes a pile of blank sheets of papers and asked the audience to choose words that describe movement qualities, for instance, fast, slow, jagged, flowy and the performer writes down these words on separate sheets of paper using a blue marker.

 Then the performer takes another pile of blank sheets of paper and asked the audience to choose different emotional qualities: sad, happy, peaceful etc and the   performer writes down these words on separate sheets of paper using a red of marker.

Then the audience gets to pick one movement written in black- one movement quality written in blue, one emotional quality written in red and the performer performs that choosen movement.  This is repeated several times, having the audience put those "choices" together for the performer to perform.  Then the choices are strewn together into a phrase.

The performer will ask audience members to come up and perform these movemetn choices.

 Conclusions/Evaluation We made up dance phrases from choosen movements that we previsously named, and named physical and emotional qualites.  The ending piece of choreography that we all came up with was 1) running in a squiggly circle, crazily, 2) laying down an egg peacefully to the rhythm of the construction workers hammering next store 3) flying like a wave.  Simple choreography that these dancers performed beautifully, we did it in solos, duets, trios and quartets.  This was a great event.  The children jumped up to dance with me within minutes.  They were intesterd in making movement choices as choreographers as well as performing those choices as dancers.