Working with a Choreographer and Learning Summer Nights

My Target: To learn the choreography to Summer Nights from a piece of repertoire that Fits well with my company.

When working with a choreographer we knew that we would have to find a stage version of Grease to use as repertoire so we researched different versions of Summer Nights and came across the 2010 London Cast. This repertoire was perfect as it had a small cast and also showed the whole songs choreography. After happily choosing this as what we were going to use, we split ourselves up at different sides of the stage to create our crosscutting effect. In order to start learning the chorography  we worked on the girl’s and boy’s parts separately, using certain lyrics as anchor points, prompting us to remember the different actions we needed to perform to perform. An example of this would we ‘Splashing around’ On this line two of the girls had to lean on the table Ellie was standing on and kick their legs whilst Waving their arms in unison.  One problem we did encounter was that the video we used as repertoire also had cameras crosscutting the actors, meaning that when the T-birds were on screen we couldn’t see what the girls were doing. This meant that we had to rely on our characterisation in order to keep the scene flowing and not make it look static when we didn’t have any choreography to follow. In order to combat this we decided that If we learnt all of the choreography first we would then be able to stage our moments of ‘dialogue’ This meaning that we knew exactly what person we were going to look at and ‘act with’ when we didn’t have a section of choreography. One thing that I felt I struggled with was getting the dynamics of the choreography right. Summer Nights is such an upbeat song and I struggled to keep my movements big, depicting the ‘American Teen’ vibe that I was supposed to be giving off.

My target for my next workshop would be to keep myself ‘bouncy’ throughout the routine and to try singing the song as well as performing the choreography. This is important in order to know if we need to make any changes to the choreography so that we can still sing well.