Thursday 10th September 2015 - Lesson Analysis

West Side Story Prolouge Choreography Ideas

In this lesson we started to look at how the gangs in west side story would act on stage in the prologue.  We split into two groups and came up with a starting position, when doing this we had to think about facial expressions, relationships with each other and our posture. As we are supposed to be portraying a gang we had to show that we were intimidating and angry, this shows the nature of the gangs. After doing this we had to one by one separate ourselves from the group and stand off with a member of the opposing gang, the first time we did this we had to improvise. I found that when doing this we were not violent enough with each other, this is because we had not practiced what we were doing and therefore was not sure how far we should go. However once we had gone off with our partners whilst practicing and discussing what we were going to do i found that everyone had become more adventurous with what they were doing.

I was working with Amber and when discussing what we were going to do we decided that i was going to walk past her and nudge her. Amber then retaliated and hit me and then we just going to generally fight each other. When showing the rest of the class I found that we worked better together as we knew what we were doing and it wasn't unexpected like it was when we were improvising.


We then split into two groups and started to come up with ideas for the prologue of West side story, we had to be gangs like in the musical and choreograph movement to go with the music that is based on the videos that we watched previously. We stared walking together in a close group, this shows how intimidating the gang as a whole is as we are so close together. If it was just a single individual or if the group was spread apart, it wouldn't be as threatening. As in the original musical a lot of dance movements are used to show how the gang moves around, we used some of these ideas, for example we experimented with jumping whilst travelling as a group. However when looking back at the videos I notices that sometimes our timing wasn't as good as it could have been. This meant that it did not look as effective as it could have if we were in time with each other, it would have emphasized how much of a close group the gang was. We also used different levels whilst using the idea of clicking, when doing this we also used cannon, for example Amber who was at the front of the formation went down first, followed by the next two followed by the next three. Our formation also suggested that we were a gang with a leader, this is because we were in a triangle and therefore the front person is automatically preserved as the leader, this person has more status that the rest of the group as they are they're followers.