Learning Diary Five Saturday 24th April

It always helps when you lose all your work when your computer crashes, especially when you haven't backed it up. Thankfully I have been lent another computer and my work has been revived, but the computer itself has gone to the computer hospital.

Plus with the set back of typing up all my work again I am going on holiday the week before the dead line ( a much needed holiday, as I have lost my voice from teaching too much) volcanic ash permitting.

So, things are all on the go and I am working hard everyday on my module of work, which I am quite enjoying seeing as it is something that I am interested in. I am currently critiquing my own pilot survey for activity seven (I hope this is feasible for activity seven, but I did receive some good feedback about improving it and I thought it would be much more relevant to my own research to evaluate my own data collection design. If it isn't; someone please let me know!)

On reflection and thinking about re drafting my current research proposal, I feel I need to go back into my resources on methodology and data collection and improve my writing about this section. I also need to look more specifically about when and what I am planning to do with my experiments, what I am going to inform parents about and what I shall explain to the participants.

The Easter School

Above: The last day of the Mamma Mia Easter School, pulling their best Abba poses!!

Below: Their lovely smiling faces!!

So after weeks of organising, worrying, contacting Mums, enduring nightmares of studios flooding, it finally happened and despite the lady with the keys for the hall turning up late thus me making a bad impression on the first day, the four day course occurred successfully!

It was the first thing like this I've ever organise, so quite an exciting challenge to embark upon. Luckily, having worked for many dance/theatre schools and holiday schools I have picked up a few different ideas on the best way to run my own course.

We had a show on the last day and I face painted Abba-style flowers for everyone, made sequin hair bands to fit in with the Abba theme all with lights and music. A massive turn out of 50+ parents, siblings, grandparents and friends. Even my Mum and Nan came to support!

I promoted the main school a lot and spotted some potential for new children to carry on training and we advertised to the parents during the show. We had a turn out of 22 children and most didn't already belong to the school, so it gives them a taster into the sort of things we do.

The whole experience has been a massive learning curve and I've been asked to run a Summer School too. I've learnt what not to do next time, to make it run more smoothly and less stressful for me, and other teachers would like to get involved, so there is the possibility of expanding it. What's more it made a profit in the end, so in the business sense it was very successful.

Learning Diary Four Wednesday 21st April

An extremely useful campus session yesterday. Being able to discuss freely with your peers and tutors really helped me understand the areas I was stuck on. I would like to thank Sophie Gilbert for explaining some of the proposal points to me and I would like to also thank Peter for clarifying those points as well as clearly explaining my idea in another light.

I keep seeing on the advisor blogs and campus session slide shows about "not being too vague" with your idea. No one wants you to save the world with your research as you are likely to take a lifetime trying to. I always seem to think "yes that's so obvious, I'm not with my project; I'm being reasonable" but really I wasn't. I now know how I can specify my research even further thanks to Peter.

I am looking at "the best methods of teaching my choreography to female street-jazz students aged 14 to 20", which has been narrowed down from "best methods of teaching choreography". What I hadn't considered and even since sending in my proposal draft, was what determines these "best methods"?

How do you measure this?

What specifically do I want to look at?

So since this light bulb realisation I have decided on "accuracy". The accuracy of my dancers performing a choreography will be measured and experimented with. I will determine an average first and see if this is improved by changing my teaching methods. Looking back at my previous notes, accuracy was one area I wanted to look into.

I am quite excited about starting this experiment.

The methods will be developed from the survey I carry out on professional dancers, and from their experience try to create some new and varied ways of teaching a choreography to the group.

Lots will need to be done in terms of ethics for filming these classes during the experiment, but I'm looking forward to preparing it over the Summer.

Monkey People?

Hello, sorry to nag, but if any other professional dancers/musical theatre could complete my survey it would be lovely.

Thank you to those wonderful three that have! x ps here's another cute monkey as a form of persuasion....

Monkey Time! Survey Time!

If you would be so kind as to complete the entirety of my survey pilot which has been created for PROFESSIONAL DANCERS on the subject of learning choreography. Thank you very much your time and effort is appreciated especially as lots of us are creating them right now!

Click here to take survey

Any extra feedback on the survey would also be appreciated, as it no doubt will have flaws. It took three sittings to get it to this stage, as I had to return to what I actually wanted to find out and delete the pointless questions I had entered.

Anyway, thank you x

More Rehearsal Pictures: Alice In Wonderland

A Document of Rehearsals For My First Ballet Choreography

Alice In Wonderland

Only photos of the senior group have been taken due to obtaining permission.

These photos are the "dream scene" which is part of the street ballet section towards the end of act 2. The music is Sweet Dreams by Eurhythmics.

Another Project On The Go: Alice In Wonderland Ballet

The beginning of the dream scene, where Alice has "had enough"
The end section of Alice in Wonderland where Alice is ending her adventure.

I am currently choreographing my first ever ballet for YEM Theatre School with around 40 children. You may remember my Alice in Wonderland posts from a while back, when I was in the research of ideas and themes and characters. Rehearsals are now well under way but still have a long way to go.

The music was my first starting point. So, iTunes was an absolute must to download music, but also Spotify to test it out and listen to it first. Of course being me, I didn't just look for classical music, I searched through a few themes and ideas to collect my final play list. I have incorporated tracks from Madonna, De Bussy, Hartly and Eurythmics so as you can tell; quite a diverse range. I integrated tracks to create my story line and cut the music accordingly. I now have a two act ballet of four minutes per act. From past shows ballet has always been the slow down for a fast paced show, but not this year I hope. Especially since this is the first ballet to include "street ballet"!

I took some photos of rehearsals in action (with permission) just to document the work taking place. I am working with five different classes. Each group meanders around the choreography I just hope it will work once all dancers are put together. Not only have I got the five ballet classes, but also three jazz groups to build up numbers (as we lost some students after the last unethical teacher).