Bryony Mylroie Smith: It's all new!
Monday, Nov 15 2004, 02:27
New day, new week, and the beginning of writing my weblog. I've only had one class today so there's not much to tell about this week so far, but last week was really good....
From Monday through til Friday Scottish Dance Theatre were in the space taking us for class in the mornings and creative class in the afternoon. I didn’t know what to expect from the week as I’ve only been in Scotland since the end of August and hadn't heard much about Scottish Dance Theatre before then. Monday morning I arrived in the studio early to warm-up and join in the cheery banter with my friends 'Who's gonna be taking our class?' followed by the echoing, 'I hope it's...'. At this point I didn’t have a response, I didn’t know the different dancers from one another. I'd seen SDT at the Rep but we'd been sat pretty far back and that was quite a while before.
At about ten to nine a tall guy walked in-Baptiste. He introduced himself with his lilting French accent in almost perfect English announcing that he'd be taking us for the week along with Ruth in the afternoons for creative. The class was really good. A lot of the movement was about being relaxed in the positions we were in and finding a comfortable way of moving. It was a fun class, exercises were done to classic songs from 'Dirty Dancing' and Baptiste danced away at the front, bobbing his head when we did things right, the combination had everybody smiling!
In the afternoon we met Ruth. She spoke in a chilled out voice that instantly left everybody comfortable in the environment. We started by doing improvisations, firstly in threes whilst the rest of the group watched. We were given a scenario of two friends and then the third person trying to get the attention of the other two, or just one of the two. I really liked this, I love acting! We did different scenarios also, sometimes with five people. My favourite was with the whole group. There were two people chosen that had to have a motif of movement to try and gain the attention of the other members of the group. We never knew before we started who we would go to but once one person had decided the rest of the group would flock over and join them.
To finish off the class Ruth and Baptiste told us their idea for our Friday showing: The rituals of birds. We watched videos of birds when they are looking for a mate and saw the different ways that they call for one. In the last five minutes we were given the task of trying to make up some different calls of our own. Everyone started off quite shyly but at the end of the five minutes there were some amazing movements coming out of it, and it was so funny!
The afternoon creative class followed the same format on Tuesday-improv, and doing random bird like movements. By Wednesday we began to choreograph a group piece using everyones calling motifs. What can I say about this piece other than the random movement just had everyone laughing so much.
Wednesday morning I was really tired, it didn’t help that we had ballet first thing as that always takes lots of concentration-mentally-for me. In the afternoon we were split into groups to begin setting the work that we had previously done as improvisation (the different scenarios with friends competing for other people etc). I was in a group with three other people-the first three of us were trying to get the attention of the fourth person by performing calling sequences whilst the fourth person was trying to get the attention of the other three but the three doing the 'calling' are oblivious to the fourth person...it's not that complex, I just don’t think I’m very good at putting it into words!
Thursday.... final creative class with Ruth and Baptiste we rehearsed our group piece and worked on our small pieces also. To tell you the truth, right up until the last ten minutes of rehearsing our quartet I felt that it wouldn’t ever get to the point of being worth showing, but, as with all things it just turned out alright and everything slotted into place.
After afternoon class we all sat and chatted to Ruth and Baptiste about EVERYTHING-Scottish dance theatre, their training, their different stories about the other dancers-EVERYTHING. On Friday we had classes in the morning at Northern College which is 2 bus rides away from our normal campus and the space. The morning went realllllly fast and before I knew it, it was lunchtime and we had to find our way back to the space.
Our showing of work wasn’t until 3 so we had a couple of hours to do nothing; we sat and chatted to Ruth and Baptiste whilst they chose music to accompany our different pieces. The showing went really well, our group went first (there are two first year groups-red and blue-we're red) and left everyone in hysterics. After last week I found that I could (finally) name all the different members of Scottish Dance Theatre and recognise them also.
Well, I feel like that’s a bit rushed to get in all the stuff about the week, but finally I can get onto the weekend!
Saturday night I went to see Scottish Dance Theatre with a group of my friends. SDT performed two pieces my favourite being their last. In this piece the girls wore big hooped skirt. The piece was so good, it had my friend sat next to me crying, there was just so much emotion put into it!
The second and third years also performed on Saturday, and afterwards everyone went out to celebrate. We were invited along also and so a big group of us (!!INCLUDING SCOTTISH DANCE THEATRE!!) went out. We were up dancing into the early hours, it was great! Anyway, I’ve no time left on the computer right now, I’ll write soon!
Filed by Article19 at 2:27 PM | 
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