Dance Video - Tutorial 1

Today we attended a tutorial with Rachel (choreographer) to present what we have thought about so far in terms of the dance video idea we have based on phobias. She helped raise points for us to think about and help us develop. Here is the main points we spoke about:

She suggested not only to think about Phobias in terms of fear but really take time to research into the phobias and correlate this into physical attributes and words to work with when choreographing the dance. Also research into how people feel when these phobias strike to find physical representations for this. - We have decided we want to talk to people about their phobias to gain first hand research to help us think into physical representations of these. We will also do online research into phobias and therefore make an informed decision about which phobias we will represent within our video. We will then take this research and use it to help us develop lists of words to go with each phobia to inspire and direct the dancers.

We mentioned our idea about weather to have a professional dancer or weather to have a real person with the phobia. We spoke about how the real person would give a subtle yet real performance however a dancer will be more stylised and interpretive. - We have decided we will write a list of pros and cons for each and tis will help us work out what is more important to us and which approach will work better.

There is also the possibility of having a professional dancer and an amateur dancer either dance together or take a split screen approach and compare them. - We aren't sure about this idea yet because then it leads into a much more documentation video and we are very keen to keep it dance focused. However the duet idea is very possible but like I have said we need to list pros and cons and work out what matters to us.

We spoke about our decision to focus on three different phobias and have about a minute on each. Rachel suggested we could break it down even further and break each phobia down into maybe 2 or 3 main states. - I really agree with this point as this will make it a lot more focused with in the choreography developing process and this will make our final outcome a lot stronger.

Another interesting idea we developed during conversation was to have a slightly different styles of dance for each phobia. - I already wanted to approach it in this way as we want different music for each phobia so naturally the dance will be slightly different but this should be something to focus on.

In terms of discussing locations Rachel suggested if we are going for a village hall kind of style that maybe the local scout hut would be cheaper or even free to use. - We are going to look down this avenue as it is also much more accessible to us being really close to the university and it has the ascetic that we have been looking for.

We then spoke about our music idea in more detail which Rachel liked. - We have decided we will get a rough track together before the choreography is made which will hopefully inspire the dancers. We can then after filming get this music credited if needs be. I have a music contact in London who is willing to do this for us.

Overall this tutorial was very helpful in terms of talking out our ideas and we now have a plan in place to progress. Most importantly we need to make a decision on the phobias and what we want to achieve then find the dancers and location ASAP.