On Tuesday, we started by singing 'You're the one that I want' with the entire cast. I found this difficult because the song is right at the top of my vocal range and I didn't warm up enough at the top of my range especially for the chorus of the song. Because of this, I decided to focus on my characterization when singing this and just drop it an octave for the chorus in the rehearsal so that I was still making some sort of progress towards my final goal. I noticed that I was still stumbling on some of my word so I need to make sure that over the week I start to have a look at them at home and warm up properly using Sirening to properly reach the top of my range with good tone.
In Thursdays lesson we started to choreograph 'Summer Nights' which is possibly one of the biggest and most iconic songs in the show, its also vital to get this song right as it establishes the two groups and the contrast between them creates comedic moments. The choreographer really wanted to use our own ideas from our class to create this dance so we had to think about a number of factors before starting to choreograph: the vast variety of experience amongst the cast; the sheer number of chorus, dancers and principles that needed to be involved, and most importantly making it interesting enough for the audience to enjoy.
We choreographed the dance as a split stage; I was in charge of choreography the boys side where Danny is telling the T-Birds about how he met a girl on holiday and all the stuff they got up to when they were with each other. Because of this, I wanted to show a slight sense of immaturity amongst the boys so we included some moments of thrusting and suggestive movements whilst also adding some slick formations and dance steps on the bleachers. I took a lot of inspiration from the choreography in Grease Live as I really enjoyed the way the T Birds interacted with each other and maintained their sense of individuality still. We mainly focused on just choreographing the T-Birds moves for now as we will block the chorus into this number later down the line and the Choreographer is going to create something for the dancers to do. We created almost a comic book strip of formations and movements we would be doing line by line and made sure to annotate what each character would be doing so that we could remember it.
On Friday I started to learn the choreography for 'You're the one that I want' - I found this song difficult to dance to as I am already struggling with singing it and so to combine the two I am finding very difficult. There is a lot of partner work involved in this song and so I will need to practice the choreography a lot with Taylor playing Sandy as she choreographed this dance and so she will be able to teach me in detail. I know that i need to work on the specific details of this dance as it links to my target of improving Jazz technique.
On Sunday we had a full day rehearsal to block Jan's Basement and then recap some choreography later in the afternoon. I was unfortunately unable to make the first half of the rehearsal but that wasn't too catastrophic as I'm not in Jan's Basement scene and so would have just been individually doing lines or something similar. On arrival to rehearsal I found out some devastating news: our female lead Taylor had broken her foot in an audition and was unable to play the part of Sandy anymore - luckily we had a vocal coach who is the same age and been in the show before and at a lot of our rehearsals and so she could pick up the part quickly we hoped but it does mean that i will have to recreate the whole dynamic between Danny and Sandy that me and Taylor had already created. Once they had finished the last bit of blocking for that scene i took the boys away to continue to block and learn Summer Nights - we had to teach Alfie the blocking we had already done earlier in the week as he wasn't there first. After blocking about half the number, we kept running the number with music and singing numerous times to make sure it was stuck in our heads. With only about an hour left of the rehearsal, we decided to recap the Greased Lightning choreography as we hadn't looked at this for quite a long time and felt rusty on the formations and choreo. immediately from running this dance it was clear we had forgotten small things like the way we should be facing or smaller hand placements and we needed to adjust this as soon as possible because this is probably the most well-known song in the show and is definitely the showstopper of the production so needs to look slick and well-rehearsed. Once we had gotten the choreography back up to scratch we managed to get a bit of time to add character to our dance moves which was important for me as my target was to improve my non-verbal communication skills and dance is one of the ways i can do that.
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