Week Begining - 30/09/19

This week we learnt Shakin' at the High School Hop and blocked Act 1 Scene 7. Shakin’at the High School Hop is a very fast paced dance with lots of techniques I have already learnt from Hand Jive and so I was excited to learn this to see how quickly I would pick it up. Furthermore, from our read through I remember how in Act 1 Scene 7 Danny shows signs of jealousy and breaks his stereotype of always being cool and uncaring.
In our lessons, we started to learn High School Hop where we actually picked up our choreography extremely quickly and was thoroughly enjoying it and personally, I believe I found it easier than before because I had learnt most of our dance techniques being used in previous week’s. Furthermore, I picked up this choreo much easier once i'd learnt the lyrics to the song as each line of the song directly correlated to the choreography. Because I picked up this choreography rather quickly, I was relied upon to teach it to the other boys and placed in the centre of this dance with my partner. This led to me and a couple of other students needing to teach the rest of the cast on our Friday night rehearsal which further helped me remember the choreography as teaching other people meant I knew the dance better myself which leads to me being able to focus on my characterisation whilst dancing confidently which was one of my targets.
In our Tuesday rehearsal we blocked Act 1 Scene 7 – Danny has few lines in the scene and so I knew that body language and posture would be important to convey how I’m feeling, for example throughout the song ' look at me I’m Sandra Dee' I would sit back and roll my eyes or other gestures along those sort of lines to show how I was fed up of this mocking. However, for my few lines I knew that I needed real attitude to show how I felt : for the line “ oh yeah, then whattya doin hanging around then?” I originally interpreted this as a joke towards the other T Birds as if I was being immature to get their approval however on reflection of feedback from a director, I realised this wasn’t Cong across how it should be and so instead we changed the meaning of this line to be a cruel one.where he wishes to make Sandy feel uncomfortable and so I decided to sit forward and raise my voice but have a smug tone as if I were better than her when I called her out for hanging around with us.
This week went well and was happy with how well I picked up High School Hop however I do feel I need to make sure I go over this choreography next week as otherwise I will forget small details otherwise. Next week we are only focussing on scenes really and so will be blocking Act 2 scene 3 and Act 1 Scene 6 – both of which are big scenes for me and so I will try to have a read through of the scripts this weekend and make notes of any ideas I have about my character for these scenes.